is to make a Kakhyen young man and maiden one arrives, we are told by Dr. Anderson, in his Mandelay to Monson

"Five young men and girls set out from the bridegroom's village to that of the bride, where they wait till nightfall in a neighboring house. At dusk the bride is brought thither by one of the stranger girls, as it were, without the knowledge of her parents, and told that these men have come to claim her. They all set out at once for the bridegroom's village. In the morning the bride is placed under a closed canopy outside the bridegroom's house. Presently there arrives a party of young men from her village, to seareh, as they say, for one of their girls who has been stolen. They are invited to look under the canopy, and bidden, if they wish, to take the girl away; but, they reply, 'It is well; let her remin where she is.'

This practice is identical with the custom which prevailed among the Maoris of New Zealand before they learned from our countrymen that there were other and more civilized ways of entering the state of matrimony.

The Le people of Hainan, like the Soligas of India and the Kookies of Chittagong, have no marriage ceremony. A mutual inclination is all that is considered necessary to constitute a union, though supreme importance is attached to the outward and visible sign of the contract. The man, to mark the bride as his own, tattoos her face with a pattern which may be described as his coat of arms, it being the insignia of his family; and with the same tracery he covers her hands.

Among the lowland Formosans there is an approach in some matters to the Chinese ritual. The happy pair constitute themselves man and wife by pouring out libations to heaven and earth, and by worshiping at their ancestral shrines; but in the preliminary stage they are unhampered by any such civilized custom. The young man having fixed his affections on a particular maid, serenades her with all the music at his command, and she, if she favors his suit, allows herself to be enticed by the melody in o his company. But after the manner of the Turkomans, so soon as the marriage ceremony is over the bride returns to her father's house, and the husband is only permitted to hold communication with her by stealth, going at nightfall to her home, and returning at early dawn, until he has reached the age of forty, or until her first child is born. After either of these events she assumes her natural place as mistress of his household.

Although one and all of these customs are held in supreme contempt by orthodox Chinamen, they themselves preserve in their marriage rites many traces of the ancient usage which these symbolize. For instance, a Chinese groom always sends a company of men for his bride, and very commonly at night, as though to make his assault easier and a rescue more difficult, as used to be the case in Sweden, where marriages were commonly celebrated at night and under the protection of armed men But at the foundation of the

Chinese marriage code is the law which forbids a man to marry a bride of the same surname as himself. As each surname is supposed to represent a clan, this law of exogamy points backward to a time when even the ceremonial Chinaman captured his bride from a foreign tribe, as possibly the existence of female infanticide may be a reflection of a time when the Chinese found their daughters objects of attack and their sons sources of strength. It is a suggestive fact also, that the symbol representing the word Sing-a "tribe, clan, or surname"-is composed of two parts, which mean "born of a woman." This plainly has reference to a time before the institution of marriage, when, on account of promiscuity of intercourse, or of the custom of polyandry, kinship was reckoned through the females, and not through the males. Another feature among the Chinese, which may possibly point to a polyandrous origin, is the fact that, as among the Tamul and Telugu people of Southern India, paternal uncles are usually called fathers, the eldest being Pohfu, or Tafu, "eldest father" or "great father," and the younger Shuhfu, or "younger father." But a still further piece of evidence is furnished by the circumstance that cousins are called T'ang hiung-ti, or "home brothers," showing that the sons of brothers were at one time reckoned as brothers to each other.

As, however, orthodox Chinese history begins at a period when the rites of marriage were in full force, it is only by these faint echoes of a still earlier period that we can trace back the ritualistic Chinaman to the level of less civilized races. But even in Chinese history we find references to ancient sages whose mothers' names only were recognized, their fathers' being unknown even to tradition. In this difficulty, the annalists have had resort to the deus ex machina, commonly produced to explain any fact unintelligible to them, and tell us that to miracle must be ascribed the event which has dropped out of history. Thus Fuh-he (B. c. 2852-2737), the legendary founder of Chinese civilization, is said to have been conceived in consequence of his mother treading in the footstep of a god when wandering on an island in the western river. But it was by this fatherless Fuh-he that the marriage rite was, according to tradition, first instituted; and the light in which it was anciently regarded may be gathered from the symbols which at an early period were adopted to express the words signifying "to marry" as applied respectively to the marriage of the man and of the woman. The man is said to Ts'ü his bride that is to say, in accordance with the gloss put on the expression by the symbol, "to seize on the woman;" while the lady is said to Kia, or "woman the household" of her husband.

The ceremonies employed in Chinese marriages differ widely in the various provinces and districts. In all, however, a "go between" is ingaged to find, in the first instance, a fitting bride for the would

be bridegroom; to conduct the preliminary proceedings of bringing the parents to terms; and to see to the casting of the horoscopes and the exchange of presents. The gifts presented are of infinite variety; but in almost every case a goose and a gander, the recognized emblems of conjugal fidelity, figure conspicuously among the offerings made by the bridegroom. The choice of these birds is so strange, that one is apt to consider it as one of the peculiar outcomes of the topsyturvy Chinese mind, which regards the left hand as the place of honor, and the stomach as the seat of the intellect. But this is not quite so, for we find from George Sand that at the marriage of French peasants in Berry, a goose was commonly borne in the bridegroom's procession.

For several days before the wedding the Chinese bride and her companions go through the form of uttering cries and lamentations at the prospect of the fate in store for her; but it may be safely assumed that

"What she thinks from what she'll say,
Lies far as Scotland from Cathay."

And certainly, as a rule, on the marriage-morn no traces of grief mar the features of the victim. So soon as the arrival of the "best man" is announced, a large red silk wrapper is thrown over the bride's head and face, and thus veiled she is conducted by the "best man" to the wedding sedan-chair in waiting. Accompanied by music, and escorted by forerunners and followers, she is carried to the door of her new house. As the chair stops, the bridegroom comes out and taps the door with his fan, upon which it is opened by the bridesmaids, who help the bride to alight. She is not, however, allowed to enter the house in the ordinary way, but is carried across the threshold on the back of a servant, and over a charcoal fire. The act of carrying her into the house, wrapped in her red silk covering, suggests the idea that the practice may be a survival of some such custom as that still in vogue on such occasions among the Khonds of Orissa. On this point General Campbell, in his Personal Narrative of Service in Khondistan, writes:

"I saw a man bearing away upon his back something enveloped in an ample covering of scarlet cloth; he was surrounded by twenty or thirty young fellows, and by them protected from the desperate attacks made upon him by a party of young women. On seeking an explanation of this novel scene, I was told that the man had just been married, and his precious burden was his blooming bride, whom he was conveying to his own village.

What may be the meaning of lifting the bride over a charcoal fire it is difficult to say. It has been suggested that it may either be an act of purification, or the fire may possibly have been originally intended to serve as a bar against the rescuing force, and to prevent the possibility of escape on the part of the bride. But having once

been safely deposited in the reception hall, the lady prostrates her self before her husband, and submits to have her red veil lifted by her lord with a fan-a custom which, again, finds a parallel among the peasants of Berry, where, we are told, "On assayait trois jeunes filles avec la mariée sur un banc, on les couvrait d'un drap, et, sans les toucher autrement qu'avec une petite baguette, le marié devait, du premier coup d'eil, deviner et désigner sa femme." Worshiping heaven, earth, and their ancestors, followed by a mutual pledge in wine, completes the ceremony, after which, among the well-to-do classes, the young people take up their abode in the household of the husband's parents. In some parts of the Canton province, however, it is the custom, as also among the Formosans, for the bride to return to her father's house immediately on the conclusion of the marriage ceremony. In such cases the husband is for three years only allowed to gain stolen interviews with his wife, and it is only at the end of that period that she becomes part of his household.

The adoption of these more permissive forms of marriage has had the unexpected effect of encouraging young girls to protest against the evils arising from the prevailing system of concubinage, by rebelling against marriage altogether, and the result has been the formation in parts of the Conton province of large and increasing antimatrimonial associations.

"The existence of the Amazonian League has long been known, but as to its rules and the number of its members, no definite information has come to hand. It is composed of young widows and marriageable girls. Dark hints are given as to the methods used to escape matrimony. The sudden demise of betrothed husbands, or the abrupt ending of the newly married husband's carcer, suggest unlawful means for dissolving the bonds.'

"

Even when compelled to submit to marriage, says Mr. B. C. Henry in his Ling-nam; or Interior Views of Southern China, "they still maintain their powers of will. It is a common saying that when a man marries a Sai-tsin woman, he makes up his mind to submit to her demands. The same characteristics are said to prevail among the women of Loong-Kong, the next large town to the south, one of their demands being that the husband must go to the wife's home to live, or else live without her company." The effect produced by this petticoat rebellion upon local society has been to reduce it to its original elements-a condition of things which, in the old world, would have suggested the necessity of marriage by capture in its most primitive form.-Blackwood's Magazine.

THE TIME IT TAKES TO THINK.

ALL science is partly descriptive and partly theoretical. Care must, however, be taken lest too much theory be built up without sufficient foundation of fact, or there is danger of erecting pseudosciences, such as astrology and alchemy. The theories of the conservation of energy and of the evolution of species are more interesting to us than the separate facts of physics and biology, but facts should be gathered before theories are made. The way of truth is a long way, and short cuts are apt to waste more time than they save. Psychology is the last of the sciences, and its present business seems to be the investigation of the facts of consciousness by means of observation and experiment. Everywhere in science experiment is worth more than observation; it is said that the evidence in pathology is so contradictory, that almost anything can be proved by clinical cases. Psychology, owing to its very nature, must always depend largely on observation for its facts, and some progress has been made in spite of the difficulties lying in the way of introspection and the correct interpretation of the actions of others. The application of experimental methods to the study of mind is, however, an important step in advance, and would seem to be a conclusive answer to those who, with Kant, hold that psychology can never become an exact science. I propose explaining here how we can measure the time it takes to think, and hope this example may show that the firstfruits of experimental psychology are not altogether insignificant or uninteresting. Just as the astronomer measures the distance to the stars and the chemist finds atomic weights, so the psychologist can determine the time taken up by our mental processes. It seems to me the psychical facts are not less important than the physical; for it must be borne in mind that the faster we think, the more we live in the same number of years.

It is not possible directly to measure the time taken up by mental processes, for we cannot record the moment either of their beginning or of their end. We must determine the interval between the production of some external change which excites mental processes, and a movement made after these processes have taken place. Thus, if people join hands in a circle, and one of them, A, presses the hand of his neighbor, B, and he as soon as possible afterward the hand of C, and so on round and round, the second pressure will be felt by each of the persons at an interval after the first, the time depending on the number of people in the circle. After the hand of one of the persons has been pressed an interval very nearly constant in length passes before he can press the hand of his neighbor. This interval, which we may call the reaction-time, is made up of a number of