Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/78

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60
THE Lî Kî.
CH. III.

himself could not have seen it. The argument of those editors, therefore, that some scholar, later than the Smaller Tâi, must have incorporated it with what we find in the Greater Tâi, adding a beginning and ending of his own, so as to form a Book like one of those of Tâi Shǎng, and that Kǎng thought it worth his while to preserve it as the last portion of Shǎng's collection,—this argument is inconclusive. The fragment may originally have formed part of Tâi Teh's thirty-ninth Book or of some other, and the whole of this Book have been arranged, as we now have it by Shǎng himself, working, as he is reported to have done, on the compilation or digest of his cousin. However this be, the views in the Book are certainly ingenious and deserve to be read with care.

A few lines in Callery's work are sufficient to translate all of the Book which is admitted into the expurgated editions.