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after being dried in a moist oven or steam-chest, is carefully rubbed down and polished. This is repeated with each layer. Various substances, metallic and other, are mixed with the lac or applied to its surface before it is dry, and it may be carved and inlaid in different ways. This is a bare outline of a process which is long and tedious and which has many variations. Extended accounts with many interesting details will be found in Rein's "Industries of Japan," in the ninth volume of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and in Volume VII. of Captain Brinkley's "Japan."

Embroidery, like the designing for brocades and other fabrics, is an art which follows closely the analogies of the art of painting, and is governed by the same æsthetic principles. The embroiderers in Japan are not women but men, and in their work they often display remarkable taste and ability as designers, as well as craftsmanship of the highest order.

To Occidental ears Japanese music, set, as it always is, in a minor key and abounding in discords, seems unworthy of the name of music. To characterize it as merely "strummings and squealings" because it does not conform to our ideas, is, however, an unfair aspersion. The fact is that it is based upon a scale which differs from that which we use, one of its peculiarities being the introduction of a semi-tone above the tonic. In the Japanese mind music is so closely related to the sister arts of poetry and dancing that neither can well be treated separately. As