wed by ten distinct periods of
sovereigns, including the "Heavenly emperors," the "Terrestrial
emperors," and the "Human emperors," the _Yu-ch'au_ or "Nest-builders,"
and _Sui-joen_, the "Fire Producer," the Prometheus of the Chinese, who
borrowed fire from the stars for the benefit of man. Several of the
characteristic phases of cultural progress and social organization have
been ascribed to this mythological period. Authors of less fertile
imagination refer them to later times, when the heroes of their accounts
appear in shapes somewhat resembling human beings rather than as gods
and demigods.

The Chinese themselves look upon Fu-hi as their first historical
emperor; and they place his lifetime in the years 2852-2738 B.C. Some
accounts represent him as a supernatural being; and we see him depicted
as a human figure with a fish tail something like a mermaid. He is
credited with having established social order among his people, who,
before him, had lived like animals in the wilds. The social chaos out of
which Chinese society arose is described as being characterized by the
absence of family life; for "children knew only their mothers and not
their fathers." Fu-hi introduced matrimony; and in so doing he placed
man as the husband at the head of the family and abolished the original
matriarchate. This quite corresponds with his views on the dualism in
natural philosophy, of which he is supposed to have laid the germs by
the invention of the so-called _pa-kua_, eight symbols, each consisting
of three parallel lines, broken or continuous. The continuous lines
represented the male element in nature; the broken ones, the female. It
is characteristic that the same ruler who assigned to man his position
as the head of the family is also credited with the invention of that
natural philosophy of the "male and female principles," according to
which all good things and qualities were held to be male, while their
less sympathetic opposites were female, such as heaven and earth, sun
and moon, day and night, south and north. If these traditions really
represent the oldest prehistoric creations of the popular mind, it would
almost seem that the most ancient Chinese shared that naive sentiment
which caused our own forefathers to invent gender. The difference is
that, with us, the conception survives merely in the language, where the
article or suffixes mark gender, whereas with the Chinese, whose
language does not express gender, it su