t in passing on the street, with many
others, so numerous as to suggest that the same law that placed their
feet opposite to ours must have turned their heads the other way. To the
Chinese the "south-pointing needle" continued to be a mere plaything to
be seen every day in the sedan chair of a mandarin, or in wheeled
vehicles. If employed on the water, it was only used in
coasting voyages.

So with gunpowder, of which the Arabs were transmitters, not inventors.
In other lands it revolutionized the art of war, clothing their people
with irresistible might, while in its native home it remained
undeveloped and served chiefly for fireworks. Have we not seen, even in
this our day, the rank and file of the Chinese army equipped with bows
and arrows? The few who were provided with firearms, for want of
gunlocks, had to set them off by a slow-match of burning tow; and
cannon, meant to guard the mouth of the Peiho, were trained on the
channel and fixed on immovable frames.

The art of printing was known in China five centuries before it made its
way to Europe. The Confucian classics having been engraved on stone to
secure them from being again burned up, as they had been by the builder
of the great wall, the rubbings taken from those stones were printing.
It required nothing but the substitution of wood for stone and of
_relievo_ for _intaglio_ to give that art the form it now has. The
smallest scrap of printed paper in the lining of a tea chest, or wrapped
about a roll of silk, would suffice to suggest the whole art to a mind
like that of Gutenberg. In China it never emerged from the state of wood
engraving. The "Peking Gazette," the oldest newspaper in the world, is
printed on divisible types, but they are of wood, not metal, more than
one attempt to introduce metallic types having proved unsuccessful, for
the want of that happy alloy known as type-metal. It is from us that
they have learned the art of casting type, especially that splendid
achievement, the making of stereotype plates, and, later, electrotype
plates, by the aid of electricity and acid solutions. Chemistry, from
which this beautiful art takes its rise, carries us back to China, for
it was there that alchemy had its birth, as I have elsewhere shown.[4]

[Footnote 4: "The Lore of Cathay." New York: Fleming R. Revell Co., p.
41.]

Man's first desire is long life; his second, to be rich. The Taoist
philosophy commenced with the former before the Christian era,