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concerning Birrell's thoughts on appropriate dividing lines. Birrell's beliefs on this have implications for her work, certainly. For instance, when Birrell writes that 'no known city of ancient China....... is linked to an illustrious mythological founder' (p. 255), she has presumably assigned P'an Keng to history, rather than to myth. Her theoretical stance probably also accounts for Birrell's disinclination to cite Chinese ritual practices (present or past) to elucidate the basic meaning of her texts.
There are a few misleading statements in the book. The 'Appended Texts' of the I Ching is apparently dated to 800 B.C. in one place (p. 44), for instance. There are misstatements. Twice (on pp. 55 and 240) Birrell speaks of a single author for the Classic of History (Shu ching). When she moreover assigns a major commentary of the Shu ching to a K'ung An-kuo in the 2nd c. B.C., she ignores all recent scholarship on the subject. Ko Hung was not an alchemist (p 46), as Nathan Sivin has demonstrated, and Han interest in immortality techniques definitely did not decline (p. 182), as the dynastic histories show. Birrell's talk of mythic passages ‘appeal to tourism' (e.g., p. 42) discounts a more probable motive for mentioning specific mythic sites: to use physical 'evidence' to 'prove' improbable assertions. And in a very few cases, Birrell's analysis of a passage does not quite tally with her own translation. For example, of a fabled land Birrell writes that its male children are 'left to die before they reach the age of three,' while her text simply states that 'within three years, the [male child] will die prematurely' (p. 249).
There are disappointingly few references in Birrell's work to either recent archaeological reports or to Han apocrypha. The apocrypha in particular preserve valuable pre-Han information on mythological heroes, marvelous flora and fauna, and cosmology.' Furthermore, a number of topics in Chinese Mythology simply cry out for further discussion. Almost nothing is said of numerology, despite interesting studies by Wen Yi-to and others on the subject. And the Chinese notion of human invention as it relates to patterns of Heaven-and-Earth merits a full discussion. As it is, the reader is left with the erroneous impression that it is always wrong for humans to imitate the gods (p. 60). For a bibliography that is generally complete, there are lacunae, including Yü Ying-shih's classic work on early Chinese views on immortality and Susan Cahill's study of the Queen Mother of the West. Finally, Birrell's editor should have checked the multiple indices more carefully, since they do not include all books (e.g., the History of the Chou) or all mythic figures (e.g., Ch'in
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