Viewing page 130 of 234

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

112
in fortune-telling, being shaken up in a jar then drawn out by the seeker for knowledge, who felt about first for a bit with a single notch, then one with two, one with three, and one with four notches. The inscriptions on these four bones were read in the order in which they appeared and were expected to form a connected sentence. My informant "explained" the fact that no fragment had been found with more than four notches by holding one against his fingers, with the smooth edge against his thumb, demonstrating that his four fingers fitted exactly into the curved notches. (1)
     It took me three days of searching and inquiry in the neighborhood before I found the place where such bones have appeared  in a small village called Shiao Tun, a mile and a half northwest of the Changte railway station. It appears that, during the last six years, certain agents from Changte have been in the habit of coming to Shiao Tun and buying for small prices the inscribed bones dug up by the villagers each spring in the course of ploughing. These were then sent to Peking where they were bought at an advance of several hundred per cent. and finally reached the foreign and native scholars who paid high prices. With this increased demand, a new source of supply had sprung up in the form of clever forgeries made at Changte by a man named Han, one of whose productions I was able to purchase for comparison.

(1) This information is given at length not because it is either coherent or valuable in itself, but because it is suggestive of the possible persistence of ancient customs and beliefs now broken down into folk-lore etc. 

Transcription Notes:
8/13/14 removed notation stating footnote as they do not appear on original