Peking, Sept. 30.
Information reaching here from Honan indicates that the big' find of Chou dynasty bronzes and other antiques excavated from an ancient tomb at Hsincheng, south of Chengchow, might have been as valuable to archaeologists in this quarter of the world as Tutankhamen's tomb has been to Egyptian scholars, if it had been properly done, As it happened, the methods' employed by the diggers not only did incalculable damage to the antiques themselves but also rendered it; impossible for scholars to study the grave or the mode of burial.
Immediately after the discovery and excavation General Wu Pei-fu telegraphed to Mr. Carl Bishop, an archaeologist then in Peking as the representative of the Smithsonian Institution, urging him to visit the site and study the antiques. As a scientist Mr. Bishop was moved to tearg upon his arrival at Hsincheng, In a letter to Peking he writes: "The wonderful find of bronzes beats anything I ever saw. It is really colossal, both as to the size and the number of the pieces. though they were lamentably smashed in excavation... I want to utilize the discovery here to bring home to the people the need of scientific digging; from a purely monetary point of view the damage done to the present find amounts to many tens of thousands of dollars. It was really heart-rending to see the actual physical damage done to the objects themselves, to say nothing of the lost opportunity for studying a first class ancient Chinese burial."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.