The Foreigner In China (1881) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE EAST AND WEST. r I THAT the present occupants of the soil of China are " not identical as to race with the first inhabitants, appears to be a fact beyond all reasonable doubt. Coming from a remote west and northwest region, they doubtless brought with them to their new country the rudiments of the arts and sciences. Whether they possessed many independent inventions and discoveries, is a question not easily determined. Various implements and arts which have existed among them from the earliest historic times are common to nearly all countries of great antiquity,? such as pottery, brick-making, archery, swords, spears, shields, plows, carriages, harps, wind instruments, statuary, drawing or painting, drums, bells, spinning, weaving, embroidery, mail-armor, standards, flags. To imagine that all these are so natural and easy that each nation might have separately fallen upon them, is by no means a scientific or satisfactory conclusion. It is more consistent with reason and revelation to suppose that they, for the most part, were invented only once, when mankind were all together in one place. Notwithstanding the adverse opinion of some writers, we are inclined to favor the view that the Chinese acquired their astronomy from the West before the Christian era. The sudden appearance, in Sze Ma-tsin's History, of the Ca- lippic cycle?a method far in advance of anything known before in China, which was familiar to Aristotle, whose pupil, Alexander, carried his conquests to the East as far as the Punjaub, B.c. 328-325,? and the common expression, chih ching, or "the seven directors," to be taken in the sense of sun, moon and five planets, and applied to days, point them out as imitators of the Hindoos or Bactrians; and the Hindoos, certainly, in their turn, borr...