he allotted 170 millions of it to Buddhism;--perhaps he halved his
estimate of the whole, whereas Berghaus and Davids allotted to it the
highest estimates that have been given of the people.

But we have no certain information of the population of China. At an
interview with the former Chinese ambassador, Kwo Sung-tao, in
Paris, in 1878, I begged him to write out for me the amount, with the
authority for it, and he assured me that it could not be done. I
have read probably almost everything that has been published on
the subject, and endeavoured by methods of my own to arrive at a
satisfactory conclusion;--without reaching a result which I can
venture to lay before the public. My impression has been that 400
millions is hardly an exaggeration.

But supposing that we had reliable returns of the whole population,
how shall we proceed to apportion that among Confucianists, Taoists,
and Buddhists? Confucianism is the orthodoxy of China. The common
name for it is Ju Chiao, "the Doctrines held by the Learned Class,"
entrance into the circle of which is, with a few insignificant
exceptions, open to all the people. The mass of them and the masses
under their influence are preponderatingly Confucian; and in the
observance of ancestral worship, the most remarkable feature of the
religion proper of China from the earliest times, of which Confucius
was not the author but the prophet, an overwhelming majority are
regular and assiduous.

Among "the strange principles" which the emperor of the K'ang-hsi
period, in one of his famous Sixteen Precepts, exhorted his people to
"discountenance and put away, in order to exalt the correct doctrine,"
Buddhism and Taoism were both included. If, as stated in the note