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ness,’ ‘New Bloom,’ ‘Treasure Mountain,’ ‘Storehouse,’ ‘Tori I’ (‘Birdrest,’ or temple portal), ‘Shrine Row,’ ‘Aqueduct,’ ‘Mountain Breeze,’ ‘Tomb-door,’ ‘Blue Mountain,’ ‘Monkey-music,’ (name of an old comedy), ‘Mioga,’ (Name of a disciple of Buddha, stupid, and of feeble memory; hence the name of an edible vegetable said to cause forgetfulness in the mind of the eater), ‘Rich Bluff,’ ‘Conjugal Love,’ ‘Finger Valley,’ etc.
Some of the wells in Yedo, besides being noted above others, have given names to streets; we have ‘Bear’s well,’ ‘Dyer’s well,’ ‘Rock well,’ ‘Wild well,’ etc. Many other streets are named from the guard-gate at which octroi was taken, and passports were examined. A few of them take their names from the bridges over which they extend.
After all the curious and suggestive bits of information that may be gained by a study of the street-nomenclature of Yedo, we must acknowledge that it exhibits in its frequent repetitions of the same names a poverty and lack of variety that can scarcely be explained except by assigning as a reason, what is in reality the fact; viz., that Yedo, like London or Philadelphia, was originally not one homogeneous city, but has become, in course of time, from the gradual agglomeration of many villages, a homogenous city. Indeed, this seems to be the order of history, and the law of growth, of almost every large city. At the present time the jurisdiction of Tokei Fu extends over 120 villages which are considered as integral parts of Tokei. Originally the villages, which were finally ossified together, were more or less distant from each other, the extreme distance being as high as twelve miles. The inhabitants of each village developed for themselves, as their needs arose, a system of street nomenclature; which being the reflection of their life, surroundings and necessities, was, in each case, independent; and yet in the totality, from the nature of the case, these were identical. ‘Timber Street,’ ‘Carpenter Street,’ ‘Pine Street,’ ‘Willow Street,’ ‘Bamboo Street,’ would naturally be the first names. Then when a second ‘Tim-
