by way of Russia in 1558-1559. The country of which they
collected notices at that city was still known to them only as
_Cathay_, and its great capital only as _Cambaluc_.

Cathay as a supposed separate entity may be considered to come to an
end with the journey of Benedict Goes, the lay-Jesuit. This admirable
person was, in 1603, despatched through Central Asia by his superiors
in India with the specific object of determining whether the Cathay of
old European writers and of modern Mahommedans was or was not a
distinct region from that China of which parallel marvels had now for
some time been recounted. Benedict, as one of his brethren pronounced
his epitaph, "seeking Cathay found Heaven." He died at Suchow, the
frontier city of China, but not before he had ascertained that China
and Cathay were the same. After the publication of the narrative of
his journey (in the _Expeditio Christiana apud Sinas_ of Trigault,
1615) inexcusable ignorance alone could continue to distinguish
between them, but such ignorance lingered many years longer. (H. Y.)

(B)--_Chinese Origins._

Chinese literature contains no record of any kind which might justify us
in assuming that the nucleus of the nation may have immigrated from some
other part of the world; and the several ingenious theories pointing to
Babylonia, Egypt, India, Khotan, and other seats of ancient civilization
as the starting-points of ethnical wanderings must be dismissed as
untenable. Whether the Chinese were seated in their later homes from
times immemorial, as their own historians assume, or whether they
arrived there from abroad, as some foreign scholars have pretended,
cannot be proved to the satisfaction of historical critics. Indeed,
anthropological arguments seem to contradict the idea of any connexion
with Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, or Indians. The earliest
hieroglyphics of the Chinese, ascribed by them to the Shang dynasty
(second millennium B.C.), betray the Mongol character of the nation that
invented them by the decided obliquity of the human eye wherever it
appears in an ideograph. In a pair of eyes as shown in the most ancient
pictorial or sculptural representations in the west, the four corners
may be connected by a horizontal straight line; whereas lines drawn
through the eyes of one of the oldest Chinese hieroglyphics cross each
other at a sharp angle, as shown in the accompanying diagrams:--

[Illustration: Eg