occupies twenty-seven pages of the volume, and purports to be a translation of a Chinese document drawn up by the Emperor Kien Long himself.  This Emperor, described by the missionaries as ’the best-lettered man in his Empire,’ had special reasons for so commemorating, as one of the most interesting events of his reign, the sudden self-transference in 1771 of so large a Tartar horde from the Russian allegiance to his own.  Much of the previous part of his reign had been spent in that work of conquering and consolidating the Tartar appendages of his Empire which had been begun by his celebrated grandfather, the Emperor Kang Hi (1661-1721); and it so chanced that the particular Tartar horde which now, in 1771, had marched all the way from the shores of the Caspian to appeal to him for protection and for annexation to the Chinese Empire were but the posterity of a horde who had formerly belonged to that Empire, but had detached themselves from it, in the reign of Kang Hi, by a contrary march westward to annex themselves to the Russian dominions.  The event of 1771, therefore, was gratifying to Kien Long as completing his independent exertions among the Tartars on the fringes of China by the voluntary re-settlement within those fringes, and return to the Chinese allegiance, of a whole Tartar population which had been astray, and under unfit and alien rule, for several generations.  With this explanation the following sentences from Kien Long’s Memoir, containing all its historical substance, will be fully intelligible: 

“’All those who at present compose the nation of the Torgouths, unaffrighted by the dangers of a long and painful march, and full of the single desire of procuring themselves for the future a better mode of life and a more happy lot, have abandoned the parts which they inhabited far beyond our frontiers, have traversed with a courage proof against all difficulties a space of more than ten thousand lys, and are come to range themselves in the number of my subjects.  Their submission, in my view of it, is not a submission to which they have been inspired by fear, but is a voluntary and free submission, if ever there was one....  The Torgouths are one of the branches of the Eleuths.  Four different branches of people formed at one time the whole nation of the Tchong-kar.  It would be difficult to explain their common origin, respecting which indeed there is no very certain knowledge.  These four branches separated from each other, so that each became a nation apart.  That of the Eleuths, the chief of them all, gradually subdued the others, and continued till the time of Kang Hi to exercise this usurped pre-eminence over them.  Tse-ouang-raptan then reigned over the Eleuths, and Ayouki over the Torgouths.  These two chiefs, being on bad terms with each other, had their mutual contests; of which Ayouki, who was the weaker, feared that in the end he would be the unhappy victim.  He formed the project of withdrawing himself forever from the domination