A

round rocks placed here and there, then running across the middle of the landscape, till lost in a wood of fir-trees. A golden sun hangs aloft in the sky, and, turning upon a pivot, indicates the striking of the hours. On the frame below, the twelve hours of day and night are marked, where a slowly-creeping tortoise serves as a hand. bird, perched upon the branch of a plum-tree, by its song and the clapping of its wings, announces the moment when an hour expires, and as the song ceases, a bell is heard to strike the hour; during which operation, a mouse comes out of a grotto and runs over the hill. * Every separate part was nicely executed; but the bird was too large for the tree, and the sun for the sky, while the mouse scaled the mountain in a moment of time."

* *

The Japanese possess some little knowledge or mathematics, mechanics, trigonometry, and civil engineering; they have canals, intended chiefly for irrigation, and a great variety of bridges; they have learned to measure the height of mountains by the barometer, and have latterly constructed very good maps of the Japanese empire, of which the map annexed to this volume may serve as a specimen. In mechanics they have not got much beyond lathes and water-mills, nor do they desire to make further progress. The views entertained upon this subject were explicitly announced, upon

occasion of the model of an oil-mill forming part of one of the yearly presents offered to the ziogoon. The ingenuity of the invention and its admirable mechanism were highly commended, but the model was returned, because the adoption of such an aid to labour would throw out of work all those Japanese who earn their bread in the ordinary mode of making oil.

Of military engineering and navigation the Japanese are wholly ignorant, although as an aid to the latter they have long possessed the mariner's compass.

Sword-blades.- Manufactures.-Trade.-Produce.-Money.

-Post.-Ship-building.-Husbandry.-Culture of Tea, and

mode of drying. — Art of dwarfing trees, and of producing enormous sized vegetables.

THE state of the arts in Japan is another point upon which there is some difficulty in forming an opinion, partly from a little distrust in the connoisseurship of the members of the factory at Dezima, and partly from the unanimous assurances given us that the best specimens in any department are utterly unattainable by foreigners. Some notion might, indeed, be formed upon the subject from the station of the artist in the classification of society, but for the possibility that this may denote rather a past than the present state. All that can, therefore, be safely affirmed is, that

the arts are more advanced in that country than in China.

Respecting the art of music, there needs no addition to what has been already stated.

Leaving that, therefore, for the graphic art, we are told that the Japanese are extremely fond of painting, and eager collectors of pictures; that they sketch boldly with charcoal and often in ink, never having occasion to efface; that their outlines are clear, and their drawing as good as may be compatible with ignorance of perspective and anatomy. From this ignorance, probably, arises their acknowledged inability to take a likeness, the professed portrait-painters bestowing their care rather upon the dress than the features of their sitters. In birds and flowers they succeed better; and two folio volumes of paintings of flowers, with the name and properties of each written on the opposite page, the work of a Japanese lady, and by her presented to Heer Titsingh, her husband's friend, are spoken of as beautiful. Delicate finishing seems to be the chief excellence of Japanese artists.

Of the higher department of the art, landscape and figures, some specimens are afforded by the writers upon the subject, but so various in merit, that they perplex almost as much as they assist the judgment. Titsingh's plates of wedding and funeral processions, &c., from paintings by native

artists, are, as nearly as may be, on a level with Chinese pictures. Meylan's are a shade better, and such as the qualified praise bestowed might lead one to expect.* Siebold's, although he visited Japan prior to Meylan, are far better, at least those of them which are taken from pictures painted for him; and this he explains, by stating that the young native artist whom he employed was studying the European principles of his art. It is to be hoped, for the sake of the future progress of the art in Japan, that this young artist may not have been the artist who was compelled to selfslaughter by his map-copying crime. But the plates in Overmeer Fischer's splendid volume are of a character so very superior to all others; they are so highly finished, and have so much of light and shade, though defective enough in drawing and perspective, that it is difficult not to suspect some few improving touches to have been given in Holland before the Japanese pictures passed into the engraver's hands; a suspicion certainly not weakened by the inspection of the Japanese rooms in the Royal Museum at the Hague, where we are told to seek the best specimens of every description that can be smuggled into Dezima and on ship-board.†

The Japanese are unacquainted with oil-painting, but skilful in the management of water† See Note XX.

*See Note XIX.