78 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



gan at an early date;. but river navigation does not make 

 and never has made deep-sea sailors. The Chinese streams, 

 like the Egyptian Nile, were merely highways (and, in some 

 cases, practically streets, whereon the dwellings of the in- 

 habitants floated about, as they still do), and, so far from 

 the aquatic life to which they give rise, evolving seamen, 

 the greater facilities for interior communication afforded 

 by the rivers and canals rendered it easier for the dwellers 

 on the seaboard to draw upon inland sources of supply, 

 than to seek foreign ones across the unknown waters. 



Nor were their coasts or the adjacent seas favorable to 

 navigation ; while the Chinese ships, to the sailors of the 

 western world, have always seemed the very opposite of 

 what sea-going vessels should be. The huge junks, with 

 bulging hulls and high sterns, were modeled after popular 

 notions of sea monsters, the teeth and eyes of which were 

 depicted on the bows, and the fins imitated in the shapes 

 of the sails. The typhoons upset them or drove them upon 

 the reefs, or blew them helplessly far out to sea. Yet, with 

 singular ingenuity, their builders constructed them with 

 double skins and with water-tight compartments, long be- 

 fore the sea-kings of the west dreamed of such safeguards. 



The early voyages of the Chinese were merely coasting 

 trips made by the river boats, which crawled timorously 

 along the shore. No sea-going ships were built until 139 

 B. C. At the time of the Christian era, the Chinese knew 

 scarcely anything of the nearest islands to the eastward, 

 and in the ad century it is doubtful whether they ever 

 sailed beyond the extreme point of the Shantung penin- 

 sula. At this time a fifteen ton boat was considered 

 enormous. In the 3d century some desultory traffic was 

 carried on with Japan, but after that period the extension 

 of sea commerce was slow. At the beginning of the 5th 

 century Java had not been reached, and not until fifty 

 years later did Chinese junks venture as far as Ceylon and 

 the Persian Gulf. 1 All this is doubly significant as show- 



1 De Lacouperie, cit. sup. 



