The following text is for questions 17 to 20.

    Ho Kwan of Kuang Nan was a kindhearted man and never killed any living beings. He had a jar containing one thousand pieces of silver which he kept in a casket. White ants, of which there were so many in his district, invaded the casket and ate part of the silver. When his family found out what had happened, they traced the ants to a hollow cave where millions of them were living. They thought if they put all of these ants in a crucible, perhaps they could recover a part of the lost silver. Ho objected to the scheme, saying, "I cannot bear to see all these many creatures killed on account of a small sum of silver." So they let the matter drop.

    That night he dreamed that he met a king in a palace. The king thanked him because he saved the king's people. Then, the king informed that near his residence was buried a jar full of silver. Ho just needed to dig that out and kept it for himself. Ho and his descendants would reap what he had sown.

    When he woke up, he found out that his dream to be the work of the ants. Then, he dug up the place as told by the king and recovered a jar buried therein these many years. His son became an eminent scholar.

"His son became an eminent scholar." (Paragraph 3)

The word 'eminent' can be replaced by ____.