"There are, besides, in the commencement of each of these inventions,
particular features which seem calculated to show their origin. I
will not speak of the compass, the ancient use of which, in China,
Hager seems to me successfully to have demonstrated, and which passed
into Europe by means of the Crusades, previous to the irruption of
the Mongols, as the famous passage in Jacques de Vitry, and some
others, prove. But the oldest playing cards, those used in the _jeu
de tarots_, have a marked analogy in their form, their designs, their
size, their number, with the cards which the Chinese make use of.
Cannons were the first firearms made use of in Europe; they are also,
it would appear, the only fire-arms with which the Chinese were
acquainted at this period. The question as to paper money appears to
have been viewed in its true light by M. Langles, and after him by
Hager. The first boards made use of to print upon were made of wood
and stereotyped, like those of the Chinese; and nothing is more
natural than to suppose that some book from China gave the idea.
This would not be more surprising than the fragment of the Bible, in
Gothic characters, which Father Martini discovered in the house of a
Chinese at Tchang-Tcheou-Fou. We have the instance of another usage,
which evidently followed the same route--it is that of the Souan-Pan,
or arithmetical machine of the Chinese, which was, doubtless,
introduced into Europe by the Tartars of the army of Batou, and which
has so extensively pervaded Russia and Poland, that women who cannot
read use nothing else in the settlement of their household accounts,
and their little commercial dealings. The conjecture which gives a
Chinese origin to the primitive idea of European typography is so
natural, that it was propounded before there was any opportunity for
collecting together all the circumstances which make it so probable.
It is the idea of Paulo Jovio, and of Mendoca, who imagine that a
Chinese book may have been brought into Europe before the arrival of
the Portuguese in the Indies, by the medium of the Scythians and
Muscovites. It was developed by an anonymous Englishman; and
carefully putting aside from the consideration the impression in
moveable types, which is, no doubt, an invention peculiar to the
Europeans, one cannot conceive an