THE CHINESE AND THE BABYLONIANS. 63 



Whether this great Ugric family, before its dispersion, 

 became familiar with iron and the lodestone, we can only 

 surmise. 



Nor is the hypothesis incredible. The deserts and 

 steppes of western and northern Asia, over which these 

 races wandered, were as trackless as the deep, and perhaps 

 that same necessity which is "the mother of invention" 

 may as well have operated to suggest the lodestone as a 

 means of guidance to the nomad of prehistoric times as 

 to the venturesome sailor of the Middle Ages. We should 

 thus naturally seek traces of such ancient knowledge 

 among the Etruscans, Mongols and Finns, rather than 

 among the people of the Aryan and the Semite families; 

 in fact, among these we have failed to find it. The 

 Etruscan tombs have yielded suggestive but slender evi- 

 dence. When we turn, however, to the Mongols, the pre- 

 sumptive proofs multiply. 



Modern research establishes a connection between the 

 prehistoric Akkadians and the Chinese. The language 

 and the legends, the written character, the astronomy, 

 the arts, agriculture and domestic economy of China, all 

 show traces of a prehistoric community of origin with those 

 of the first inhabitants of Babylonia. M. De Lacouperie, & 

 who regards the Bak tribes, which migrated eastward from 

 the last named region during the twenty-third century 

 B. C., as the first civilizers of China, especially suggests 

 that the early Chinese names of the four cardinal points 

 much reseirible those given to the same points by the 

 Chaldeans. The same authority collates an extraordinary 

 number of instances in which the results of Chaldean 

 culture are found embodied in earlier Chinese civilization, 

 showing, for example, that from the Chaldeans the Chi- 

 nese obtained knowledge of the solar year, of their met- 

 rical system, of divination, of their musical scales, of the 

 gnomon and the clepsydra, of decimal notation and local 

 value of figures, of the transit instrument, of the fire drill, 

 of brick-making, canal digging, river embankments and 



