376 
POPULAR SCIENCE REAIEW. 
if the Chinese were as impressionable as the people of the 
“ land of the rising sun,” the effect of a movement among them 
would, for a long time, be less observable than would be the 
case in the latter country. 
But though when we turn to China we cannot point to any 
such surprising results as those which have transformed Yedo 
and Yokohama into the similitude of European cities, it would 
be a mistake to suppose that Western science has not of late 
years been making its way slowly — and perhaps all the more 
surely because slowly — among the 400,000,000 inhabitants of the 
“ middle kingdom.” It is true that they have neither adopted 
railways nor established telegraphs. Tliey have not founded 
colleges, except one in the capital, neither have European pro- 
fessors met with any demand for their services outside the walls 
of Peking. But many of the most thoughtful men of the 
Empire have been carefully comparing the state of scientific 
knowledge in China with that existing in Western lands ; and 
intellectually proud though they be, they have eagerly set them- 
selves to work to make up for the time which they have lost 
during the many centuries of stagnation which, until the 
foundation of the present dynasty, overshadowed the land. It 
is no exaggeration to say that at the close of the Ming Dynasty 
(1644) Chinese science was at a lower ebb than it was 2,000 
years before that date. From whence the ancient Chinese ac- 
quired their learning it is difficult to say, but there can be no 
doubt but that certain sciences were more studied and better 
understood by Chinese scholars in the time of King David than 
at any subsequent period prior to the accession of the Tatar 
Emperors. 
On these and kindred subjects the histories of China reveal 
origins so ancient as to dwarf into insignificance the greatest 
antiquity of which western Europe can boast. If we trace, for 
instance, the history of the science of numbers, as known to the 
Chinese, we are carried back nearly 4,000 years, to the time of 
the Emperor Hwang-ti, who, we are told, instructed his minister 
to form “ nine arithmetical sections ” under the following head- 
ings : 1. Plane mensuration; 2. Proportion; 3. Fellowship; 
4. Evolution ; 5. Solid mensuration ; 6. Alligation ; 7. Sur- 
plus and Deficiency ; 8. Equation ; and 9. Trigonometry. To 
the same emperor is attributed the formation of the sexagenary 
cycle, and this belief derives some confirmation from the fact that 
the present chronological era of cycles dates its commencement 
from the sixty-first year of his reign. In the “ Book of His- 
tory ” mention is made of the existence, in the time of the 
Emperor Yao (b.c. 2300), of an astronomical board, the mem- 
bers of which were employed in watching the motions of the 
heavenly bodies, in marking the solstices and equinoxes, and in 
