22nd Oct.
A conceIteD man whose self-love is recovering from its first rude shock is a spectacle in which a philosopher of the Chelsea school would take a grim delight. For centuries the Chinese student had been sedulously taught that his native literature was all-sufficing and that he had nothing to learn from barbarians; then came Schaal and Ricci and showed him that he could not even calculate aright the phases of the moon, on which the Imperial Calendar and the good luck of the whole. Empire depended. He recovered from this blow (for it must have been a blow) expelled the Empire—we found firn at and—Ricci's successors being by then
the close of the reign of Taokuang as superciliously contemptuous of all western methods and ideas as he had been in the blooming days of the Sung and "Mang philosophies. Time went on and his rulers came to the reluctant conclnsion that though westerners were of course, as compared with the black-haired folk, rank barbarians, they had nevertheless a way of manufacturing engines of war which if not admirable was eminently practical. They were told that this way depended upon "western science," and that not even chwang yuan, or Senior Wrangler
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.