ASSUMING that the human cradle was in the Eastern Archipelago, and more particularly in the Island of Java where Dr. Dubois discovered his Pithecanthropus erectus, the primeval home of the Mongolian division of the human race was the Tibetan plateau. From this central plateau the early Mongol groups spread during the Stone Age over the Asiatic continent, in one place developing into the Akkado-Sumerians of Babylonia, the almost extinct Hyperboreans of Siberia in another, the Mongolo-Tartars stretching across Central Asia from Japan to Europe, the Tibeto-Indo-Chinese of Tibet, Indo-China, and China, and the Oceanic Mongols of Malaysia, Madagascar, and the Philippines.

In Tibet even today, polyandrous customs are47 still strong and the nomadic² tendencies of the people show that the years of civilization or near-civilization have not changed the primitive³ roving inclinations⁴, inclinations that partly account for the indifference⁵ to child life among the Chinese.

Our knowledge of ancient China rests principally on two authorities, the Chou King of Confucius, written 484 b. c., and the Sse Ki of Tsse Ma Thsein, written at the beginning of the first era before Christ. Confucius was not able to go further back than seventeen centuries before his own time, so that we can safely say that we know something about Chinese history for about 2200 years before the Christian⁶ era. The social and political life of the Chinese people in the time of Yao, the first of the emperors named by Confucius, was that of a pastoral people, but even then most of the useful arts had been invented, writing was already known, and the first notions of astronomy on which they founded their calendar had been acquired. The successor of Yao was Chun, and after Chun came Hia, the

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