2 Mr. Davis's Memoir concerning the Chinese. 



prodigies that are recorded, as well as the fanciful names that are given to 

 their first emperors, carry with them the most unquestionable marks of 

 fabrication. National vanity and a love of the marvellous have influenced 

 in a similar manner the early history of most other countries, and furnished 

 materials for nursery tales, as soon as the spirit of sober investigation has 

 supplanted that appetite for wonders, which marks the infancy of nations, 

 as well as of individuals. The person called Fo-hi, and some of his imme- 

 diate successors, appear to have been of the number of those gifted men, 

 who rescued the human race from primeval barbarism, and whom their 

 gratitude has invested with superhuman attributes. All institutions and 

 inventions, of whose real origin no history remains,* have been referred to 

 them as to a common source ; but the grave appellation of Emperor is 

 only applied by the ignorant and the unthinking, to savages who first taught 

 their cotemporaries to make fishing nets, to till the ground, and live together 

 in a state of society.t 



In order to prove how little dependence can be placed on the accounts 

 which the Chinese give of their own antiquity and inventions, I need only 

 produce the following quotation from the abstract of history given by 

 Du Halde. " Chuen-hiu regulated the calendar, and desired to begin the 

 year the first day of the month in which the sun should be nearest the 

 15th degree of Aquarius, for which he is called the author and father of the 

 Ephemeris. He chose the time when the sun passes through the middle of 

 the sign, because in this season tlie earth is adorned xcith plants, trees renexv 

 their verdure, and all nature seems re-animated. This of course means the 

 spring season. Now Chuen-hih is said to have lived more than two thousand 

 years before Christ, and according to the usual mode of calculating the 

 precession of the equinoxes, the sun must have passed through the 15th of 

 Aquarius, in his time, somewhere about tiie middle of December. 



This strange blunder might very well have been expected from a Chinese 

 historian, but that Du Halde should have quoted it, without any comment, 



* " All they relate concerning the progress of the arts and sciences, is an incongruous mass of 

 fictions. Every thing with them is produced as if by enchantment : and events succeed each 

 other with inconceivable rapidity ; but the greatest absurdity consists in attributing all inventions 

 of that nature to princes, who we know have few opportunities of making discoveries." — De Pauw, 

 Prdiminartj Discourse on the Egyptians and Chinese. 



+ " At this time," says a Chinese author, speaking of Fo-hi, " men differed but little from 

 brutes; they knew their mother, but not their Jhther." — See Du Halde. 



