The material presented here from Tangsic makes it clear, I believe, that a revision of the statement is imperative. Tangsic is the dialect spoken in the village of Tangsi and its immediate vicinity. The location of the village is 120' 11' E, 30' 29' N, in the present province of Chekiang, within an inverted triangle whose apex is Hangchow, 16 miles south, and whose other vertices are Huchow, 31 miles northwest, and Kashing, 41 miles northeast. It is 94 miles southwest of Shanghai on a line through Kashing. For administrative purposes under the last dynasty, Tangsi belonged to the town of Tehtsing, 8 miles northwest, but was assigned sometimes to the county of Hangchow and sometimes to the county of Huchow. Though its population in 1909 was less than 20,000, Tangsi was a trading center of some importance because of its situation on the Grand Canal, the main inland thoroughfare northward from Hangchow. This slight strategic value was liquidated with the construction of the Shanghai-Hangchow railroad, which passed 8 miles to the east. Culturally, the present appearance of Tangsi, distinguished mainly by a bridge, gives no clue to its past history, since the whole area was extensively devastated during the T'ai-p'ing rebellion of 1850-64 A.D. The large estates, temples, and princely homes that marked Tangsi a century ago have become dilapidated slums. In fact, Tangsi's esteem is now chiefly in the hands of library cataloguers and bibliophiles, who will discover that it was one of the very few Chinese villages to publish its own local history, a sizable work in six volumes.2 To fill that much space, it had to produce at some time a number of outstanding men and women, and to be of some small importance to the state. Linguistically, Tangsic belongs to the large family of dialects called Wu, which occupy most of Kiangsu province south of the Yangtze and about half of Chekiang. As a subfamily of Wu one may distinguish the group of dialects surrounding Thai-hu 'the Great Lake', and these in turn may be divided geographically, those to the south having points of difference from those to the east