Abstract
AT a recent meeting of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, Dr. Macgowan, a well-known Chinese scholar, read a paper on the probable foreign origin of the ass, the cat, and the sheep in China. He said that the Chinese, in their numerical co-ordination of concrete and abstract nature, give the “six domestic animals” as the horse, ox, goat, pig, dog, and fowl; which seems to indicate that when that formula was framed, neither cat, sheep, nor ass had been domesticated there. When familiar beasts were selected to denote years of the duodenary cycle, to the “six domestic animals” were added the rat, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, and monkey, to complete the dozen, as if the ass, sheep, and cat were too little known to meet the object in view, which was the employment of the most familiar representations of animated nature for the duodendary nomenclature. Still more striking is the absence of the ass, sheep, and cat from the twenty-eight zodiacal constellations, which are represented by the best-known animals.
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The Origin of the Ass, the Cat, and the Sheep in China. Nature 45, 285–286 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/045285a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/045285a0