in the finest, the
most populous and the most anciently civilized of the four quarters
of the world. People began to think of studying the arts, the
religions, the languages of the nations who inhabited it, and there
was even a proposition to establish a professorship of the Tartar
language in the University of Paris. Romantic narratives, reduced by
discussion within reasonable proportions, diffused in all directions
juster and more varied information: the world seemed opening towards
the East. Geography made immense strides, and ardour of discovery
became the new form assumed by the adventurous spirit of Europeans.
The idea of another hemisphere ceased, as soon as our own became
better known, to present itself to the mind as a paradox destitute of
all probability, and it was in going in search of the Zipangri of
Marco-Polo that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.

"I should make too great a digression, were I to investigate what
were in the East the effects of the Mongol irruption, the destruction
of the Khalifat, the extermination of the Bulgarians, of the Romans,
and other northern nations. The decline of the population of Upper
Asia, so favourable to the reaction by which the Russians, hitherto
the vassals of the Tartars, subdued in their turn all the nomads of
the North; the submission of China to a foreign yoke; the definitive
establishment of the Indian religion in Thibet and Tartary; all these
events deserve to be studied in detail. I will not even pause to
inquire what might have been the results, to the nations of Eastern
Asia, of the intercourse which they had with the West. The
introduction of the Indian numerals into China, a knowledge of the
astronomical system of the Moslems, the translation of the New
Testament and the Psalms into the Mongol language, executed by the
Latin Archbishop of _Khan Balik_ (Peking), the foundation of the
lamanical hierarchy, framed in imitation of the pontifical court, and
produced by the fusion effected between the remnants of the
Nestorianism established in Tartary and the dogmas of the Buddhists;
such were all the innovations of which there are any traces in
Eastern Asia, and therewith the commerce of the Franks has very
little to do. The Asiatics are punished for their contempt of the
knowledge of Europeans, by the limi