m Latin--has little capacity for expansion, Chinese has
the most potential of all known tongues in that respect. Chinese may
be said to consist of a vast number of monosyllables, each expressed
by a different ideograph, each having a distinct significance, and
each capable of combination and permutation with one or more of the
others, by which combinations and permutations disyllabic and
trisyllabic words are obtained representing every conceivable shade
of meaning.

It is owing to this wonderful elasticity that Japan, when suddenly
confronted by foreign arts and sciences, soon succeeded in building
up for herself a vocabulary containing all the new terms, and
containing them in self-explaining forms. Thus "railway" is expressed
by tetsu-do, which consists of the two monosyllables tetsu (iron) and
do (way); "chemistry" by kagaku, or the learning (gaku) of changes
(ka); "torpedo" by suirai, or water (sui) thunder (rai); and each of
the component monosylables being written with an ideograph which
conveys its own meaning, the student has a term not only appropriate
but also instructive. Hundreds of such words have been manufactured
in Japan during the past half-century to equip men for the study of
Western learning, and the same process, though on a very much smaller
scale, had been going on continuously for many centuries, so that the
Japanese language has come to embody a very large number of Chinese
words, though they are not pronounced as the Chinese pronounce the
corresponding ideographs.

Yet in spite of this intimate relation, re-enforced as it is by a
common script, the two languages remain radically distinct; whereas
between Japanese and Korean the resemblance of structure and
accidence amounts almost to identity. Japanese philologists allege
that no affinity can be traced between their language and the tongues
of the Malay, the South Sea islanders, the natives of America and
Africa, or the Eskimo, whereas they do find that their language bears
a distinct resemblance to Manchu, Persian, and Turkish. Some go so
far as to assert that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit are nearer to
Japanese than they are to any European language. These questions
await fuller investigation.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF RACES

The Japanese are of distinctly small stature. The average height of
the man is 160 centimetres (5 feet 3.5 inches) and that of the woman
147 centimetres (4 feet 10 inches). They are thus smaller than any
European