8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



account refers to Japan and adjacent regions. The twenty thousand 

 li the monk is said to have traveled may parallel his mulberry trees 

 several thousand feet high and his silkworms seven feet long. In a 

 more remote Chinese record, as mentioned by Dr. Gustave Schlegel, 

 the statement is made that the inhabitants had to dig down ten thou- 

 sand feet to obtain blue tenacious clay for roofing tiles! A number 

 of ardent writers convinced that signs of Chinese contact are seen in 

 the relics of middle America have seized upon this account of Fusang 

 in support of this belief. These convictions have arisen by finding it 

 difficult to believe that the ancient civilizations of Mexico and Peru 

 could have been indigenous. In seeking for an exterior origin in 

 the Fusang account overweight has been credited to every possible 

 resemblance, and all discrepancies have been ignored. 



The fabulous account of the land of Fusang evidently supplied 

 documentary evidence, and Mexico was conceived to be the mythical 

 Fusang. Mr. Yining goes so far as to declare that " some time in the 

 past the nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America were 

 powerfully affected by the introduction of Asiatic arts, customs, and 

 religious belief." To establish the details in the Chinese account 

 the entire western hemisphere is laid under contribution: now it 

 is the buffalo of North America, then the llama of Peru, the reindeer 

 of the arctic, or some native word. These writers do not hesitate to 

 bring to life animals that became extinct in the upper Tertiaries, and 

 to account for the absence of others by supposing them to have 

 become extinct. Literal statements of horses dragging wheeled ve- 

 hicles are interpreted as an allusion in Buddhist cult which refers by 

 metaphor to attributes and not to actual objects. As an illustration 

 of the wild way in which some of these resemblances are established, 

 Mr. Yining quotes the account of M. Jose Perez (Revue Orientate et 

 Americaine, vol. viii). Perez reminds us that the inhabitants of the 

 New World gave Old World names to places in the new continent, 

 citing New York, New Orleans, and New Brunswick as examples, and 

 then says that at some remote epoch the Asiatics had given to the 

 cities of the New World the same names as the cities of their mother 

 country; so the name of the famous Japanese city Ohosaka (Osaka), 

 to the west of the Pacific, became Oaxaca in Mexico on the eastern 

 side. Now it is well known that the ancient name of Osaka was 

 Namihawa; this became corrupted into Naniwa, and not till 1492 

 does the name Osaka appear. Rev. J. Summers gives a full ac- 

 count of these successive names with their meanings (Transac- 

 tions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. vii, part iv). The real 

 question to be answered is not what might have been accomplished 

 by ancient explorers from Asia, but what was accomplished. It 

 is shown that Chinese Buddhist priests went to India in the years 



