30 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



life of the people, and which by a common saying do not run uniform 

 for ten U together, there is a like diversity in those standards of quantity 

 upon the absolute invariability of vi^hich so much of the comfort of life 

 and the entire advance of science in western lands depend. So far 

 from suffering any inconvenience in the existence of a double standard 

 of any kind, the oriental seems keenly to enjoy it, and two kinds of 

 weights, or two kinds of measures seem to him natural and normal, and 

 modern education is only just beginning to open his eyes to the inherent 

 objections. 



The whole Chinese system of thinking is based on such a different 

 line of assumptions from those to which we are accustomed, that they 

 can ill comprehend the mania which seems to possess the occidental to 

 ascertain everything with unerring accuracy. Curiously enough, con- 

 comitant with the early development of their system of weights and 

 measures — a decimal system for the most part — the Chinese have 

 become fixed in the habit of reckoning by tens, and frequently refuse 

 to make a statement of number nearer to the truth than a multiple of 

 ten. An old man is " seventy or eighty years of age," when you know 

 for a certainty that he was seventy only a year ago. A few people are 

 " ten or twenty," a " few tens," or perhaps " ever so many tens." The 

 same vagueness runs in all their statements, and for greater accuracy 

 than this the Chinese do not care, except when you are paying them 

 money. 



The first generation of Chinese chemists will probably lose " a few 

 tens " of its number as a result of the process of mixing a " few tens of 

 grains " of something with " several tens of grains " of something else, 

 the consequence being an unanticipated explosion. 



The Chinese are as capable of learning minute accuracy in all 

 things as any nation ever was — nay, more so, for they are endowed with 

 infinite patience, but what we are here remarking is that as at present 

 constituted they are entirely free from the quality of accuracy and that 

 they do not know what it means. 



Under such circumstances it is not surprising that so little real 

 progress has been made in experimental science. 



3. Lack of Mathematical Knowledge. — Although the study of 

 arithmetic attracted attention among the Chinese from early times and 

 numerous treatises are extant, and Hindu processes in algebra have long 

 been known to them, yet these branches even down to the end of the 

 Ming dynasty (a.d. 1664) made only slow progress. Trigonometry was 

 introduced by the early Jesuit missionaries and since foreigners have 

 begun to teach western science the development in these elementary 

 branches of mathematics has been fairly rapid. But still the knowl- 

 edge of mathematics is very small even among learned men; the cum- 

 bersome notation and the little aid such studies gave in the old-style 

 examinations doubtless discouraged men from pursuing what they had 



