mous Venetian traveller
of the thirteenth century, who actually lived twenty-four years in
China, and served as an official under Kublai Khan, has left it on
record that the magnificence of Chinese cities, and the splendour of the
Chinese court, outrivalled anything he had ever seen or heard of.

Pushing farther back into antiquity, we easily reach a time when the
inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom "held learning in high esteem, while
our own painted forefathers were running naked and houseless in the
woods, and living on berries and raw meat." In inventive, mechanical and
engineering aptitudes the Chinese have always excelled; as witness--only
to mention a few--the art of printing (_see below_); their water-wheels
and other clever appliances for irrigation; their wonderful bridges (not
to mention the Great Wall); the "taxicab," or carriage fitted with a
machine for recording the distance traversed, the earliest notice
of which takes us back to the fourth century A.D.; the system of
fingerprints for personal identification, recorded in the seventh
century A.D.; the carved ivory balls which contain even so many as nine
or ten other balls, of diminishing size, one within another; a chariot
carrying a figure which always pointed south, recorded as in existence
at a very early date, though unfortunately the specifications which have
came down to us from later dates will not work out, as in the case of
the "taxicab." The story goes that this chariot was invented about 1100
B.C., by a wonderful hero of the day, in order to enable an ambassador,
who had come to the court of China from a far distant country in the
south, to find his way expeditiously home. The compass proper the
Chinese cannot claim; it was probably introduced into China by the
Arabs at a comparatively late date, and has been confused with the
south-pointing chariot of earlier ages. As to gunpowder, something
of that nature appears to have been used for fireworks in the seventh
century; and something of the nature of a gun is first heard of during
the Mongol campaigns of the thirteenth century; but firearms were not
systematically employed until the fifteenth century. Add to the above
the art of casting bronze, brought to a high pitch of excellence
seven or eight centuries before the Christian era, if not earlier; the
production of silk, mentioned by Mencius (372-289 B.C.) as necessary
for the comfort of old age; the cultivation of the tea-plant from time
immemo