Every one admits that the Chinese are an ingenious people. A visit to Canton in the olden days convinced the travel ler of this, and when he selected his specimens of carved bamboo figure painted glass, miniature portraits, china tea-cups, not forgetting "laborious orient ivory, sphere in sphere," and exhibited them on his return in some country town in England, all his wondering friends and acquaintances were convinced of it too. We do not wonder therefore that they invented many things of a curious and usefal nature, such as the manufacture of silk fabrics, in the most ancient period of their historic existence, and the application of the magnetic needle to navigation in recent times. The fact that China la the native country of the silk-worm seems to guarantee to the nation for ever the honour of the invention of silk clothing. Research has deprived them of the credit of many other things, but in this they are secure. Then for the use of the needle on board ship; as long as the record of that embassy which went from Ningpo to Corea by soa in the year A.D, 1122 remains unrivalled in its antiquity in the history of navigation by the compass by that of any other people, so long the Chinese must be allowed the credit of this invention.
That the Chinese have borrowed from other intelligent races many re. markable inventions is equally true, Those who write about the Ohi without making researches often ate tribute to them the honour of inventions which really belong to other nations. In the present state of our knowledge we cannot very well go book in our investigations to the first ages, and say for certain whether the Chinese themselves invented the astrolabe with which they observed the stars in the reign of the Emperor Shun, or whether the iden was borrowed from Babylon, the native land of astronomy. Bat the the foreign origin of the instrament is much easier to believe in than the native, and there for the present the question must be left. It is different with some other inventions of a later date, The of paper for writing and of ink made of lamp-black and certain resinous woods need not be ascribed to the Chinese a original inventions. They may be reasonably referred to the Greeks, who not only became neigh. hours of the Chinese as a consequence of Alexander's expedition to Bactria, but under the Roman Empire wore for many centuries the chief conductors of trade with the Hast. It was about the year A.D. 105 that native-made paper, manufactured from bark, hemp fibre, old grass-cloth and old fishing-nots, was presented to the reigning Emperor, and from this time it grow into use rapidly. Bat paper from the Roman empire used to come la tribute with the mercantile caravans along with other western products at that time. In the year A.D, 284 a prosont of 30,000 sheets of paper was sent from the Roman Empire, probably by order of the Emperor Carus, who died in that year, leaving the throne to Dies cletian, It was the Emperor Han Wa Ti who four centuries before this time opened up a southern trade with countries bordering on the Indian ocean and established commercial route to Persia and western countries, and all through the long duration of the Han dynasty the trade which then commenced was continued with the des incident to mercantileenter-The Chinese would see paper and ink as the in use among the merchants, and in the several embassies arriving chiefly by the sea route. They would learn how they were made from the interpreters who accompanied the ambassadors, and would proceed to put in practice the lesson they received. A Governor of Canton at the end of the third century wrote a book on the new plants he saw during his residence there. In this book, which fortunately has been preserved, he mentions the cocoa-nat, the cassia, the nutmeg, the areca palm, the sugar-cane and many others, He marked out among eighty
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.