ASIATIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION. 595 



three hundred millions of men have followed the maxims of Confucius for 

 two thousand years, three hundred millions are the followers of Moham- 

 med. The faiths which govern the daily life of two thirds of the human 

 race may well be an awful spectacle to us the more awful because we 

 know that they are a delusion. The only approach to these great results 

 in the Western Continent is in the supremacy of the Italian Church ; but 

 Rome owed the origin of her system to Asiatic missionaries ; nor was it 

 the completed work of the hand of one man, it was the offspring of cen- 

 turies, the joint issue of a long line of illustrious sacerdotal kings. In 

 military life the highest qualities shine forth. If the talent for command 

 and the capacity of a statesman are to be measured by the grandeur of un- 

 dertakings and their success, it still remains for Europe to produce a sol- 

 dier the equal of Genghis Khan, and a king like Tamerlane. These great 

 captains held almost all Asia in their iron grasp. The opinions we com- 

 monly hold respecting these illustrious men have come to us through 

 perverted channels. Such prodigious successes as theirs imply the high- 

 est intellectual powers. Their true character appears when we compare 

 them with their European contemporaries. At the same time that 

 Charles VII. of France was mystifying his people with the imposture of 

 Joan of Arc, and Henry VI. of England was engaged in the burning of 

 necromancers who had attempted his life by melting an enchanted wax 

 image before the fire, Ulug Beg, the grandson of Tamerlane, was de- 

 termining with precision the latitude of Samarcand, his capital, with a 

 mural quadrant of 180 feet radius, and making a catalogue of the stars 

 from his own observations, which more than 200 years subsequently was 

 printed at the University of Oxford. 



If the European wishes to know how much he owes to the Asiatic, he 

 has only to cast a glance at an hour of his daily life. The Contributions 

 clock which summons him from his bed in the morning was * Em-^ean 

 -the invention of the East, as were also clepsydras and sun- civilization, 

 dials. The prayer for his daily bread which he has said from his in- 

 fancy first rose from the side of a Syrian mountain. The linens and 

 cottons with which he clothes himself, though they may be very fine, are 

 inferior to those which have been made time immemorial in the looms of 

 India. The silk was stolen by some missionaries, for his benefit, from 

 China. He could buy better steel than that with which he shaves him- 

 self in the old city of Damascus, where it was first invented. The cof- 

 fee he expects at breakfast was first grown by the Arabians, and the na- 

 tives of Upper India prepared the sugar with which he sweetens it, a 

 schoolboy can tell the meaning of the Sanscrit words sacchara canda. 

 If his tastes are light, and lie prefers tea, the virtues of that excellent 

 leaf were first pointed out by the industrious Chinese. They also 

 taught him how to make and use the cup and saucer in which to serve 



