20th March, Ir is good to look at familiar subjects from a new point of view. Chinese civilisation has been affirmed and denied with equal vigour. There are these who see in the teaching of Confucius and the practice of his pupils something higher thanthe more spiritual doctrine of Christ is ever licely to produce; there are others who deny to China all right or title to civilisation or culture. Between these two extremes, truth lies.
We propose to approach the question from the physical side. Thought, imagination, mental and moral con siderations of every kind are to be put aside and questions asked and answered by the body itself. What are its tastes, its likes and dislikes? How does it demean itself so far as its senses are concerned? What. sensations gratify and what repel it? What is its stage of development It may seem strange to classify men according to the powers of their eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and tactile organs. But there is profound reason at the bottom of it, and we may say at the outset that as the matter suggests itself to us there are few truer tests of civilisation than man's likes islil es as exhibited by his senses. Every individual man has gone through in his own experience the whole chapter of evolutionary history from the speck of protoplasm to the highly differentiated product injustice has made them so mad that of this, the twentieth century. Each step in his career has been step forward in his evolution. What his delights were as a child are not his delights to-day; he has outlived them. If we were to take him back to his childhood, or, better still, take note of his own little one, what do we find with regard to his sense of hearing for example? Is not the chief characteristic a love of noise? Does he not revel in the boom of cannon, the crackle of fireworks, the clash of cymbals and the roll of drums? And have we not at every celebration of the Chinese New Year proof that the native, go far as his auditory sensations are concerned, has not got beyond the stage of European childhood? Does he not shut himself up for hours at a stretch and hammer away at an orchestra composed entirely of gongs, cymbals, and tom-toms? And would it not be utterly impossible for him to do anything of the kind had his evolution reached the stage of the European That he has lagged behind is evident from what we have just pointed out, iz. that what delights the European child equally delights the Asiatic adult.
So with colour. There are symptoms of a higher development of the eye than of the ear in China. Exquisite shades of silks, beautiful tints in porcelain, and an unerring eye for seenery—witness the position of scores of Buddhist temples—are proofs that the Chinese race are advancing in the wsthetic culture of the organ of sight. But having said so much, we have said all. Where in China is the beauty perceivable in a European city? Where is there an attempt at street architecture Why do so many hundreds of natives offend the eye with the inconformity of colours in their dress? Where 1s European cleanliness to be found in house and home? There is none. In discrimination of vision, as well as in hearing, the Chinese are behind the peoples of the West. Evil sights do not offend them.
It is hardly necessary to draw attention to their deficiency in the olfactory sensations, except where disinfectants are employed. It is a curious fact that the Chinese, who apparently in happy uncon-the foulest exhalations of decaying animal or vegetable matter, are sensitive to the smell of carbolic acid, which as a rule they cordially dislike. Most foreign residents in China tind the protection of a handkerchief an absolute necessity when {passing even through a village, but the native is so impervious to odours of the Eastern type as to be quite ignorant that there is anything amiss. In the development of the olfactory nerves therefore, it would seem that the native is even behind the youngest of foreign children, who at quite an early age resent anything offensive in that respect.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.