Note 8 — Chapter III · CHINESE LITERATURE.

We find one phase of this in the worship of ancestral tablets. These are of wood, a foot high, and bear the name of the departed ancestor, the hour of his birth, and that of his decease. They are worshipped twice a month with tapers and burning incense. Death is believed to liberate three spirits from the tenement of clay; while one of these occupies the grave, and another seeks the invisible world, the third is supposed to take up its habitation in the tablet erected by filial reverence. The accompanying engraving shows one of these ancestral tablets with its inscription in Chinese. (Read Du Bose’s “The Dragon, Image, and Demon.”)