ciety by each of its fellows, who may not have chosen to compound for it on his admission. This I mention not from an idea that any of us could object to the purchase of one copy at least, but from a wish to inculcate the necessity of our common exertions in promoting the sale of the work both here and in London. In vain shall we meet as a literary body, if our meetings shall cease to be supplied with original dissertations and memorials; and in vain shall we collect the most interesting papers, if we cannot publish them occasionally without exposing the superintendents of the Company's press, who undertake to print them at their own hazard, to the danger of a considerable loss. By united efforts, the French have compiled their stupendous repositories of universal knowledge; and by united efforts only can we hope to rival them, or to diffuse over our own country and the rest of Europe the light attainable by our Asiatic Researches.

DISCOURSE VII.

DELIVERED FEBRUARY 25, 1790.

ON THE CHINESE.

Origin of the people who governed China before they were conquered by the Tartars.-Examination of the language, and letters, religion and philosophy, of the present Chinese. -Remarks on their ancient monuments, sciences, and arts. -The importation of a new religion into China.

GENTLEMEN,

ALTHOUGH We are at this moment considerably nearer to the frontier of China than to the farthest limit of the British dominions in Hindustan, yet the first step that we should take in the philosophical journey which I propose for your entertainment at the present meeting, will carry us to the utmost verge of the habitable globe known to the best geographers of Old Greece and Egypt; beyond the boundary of whose knowledge we shall discern, from the heights of the northern mountains, an empire nearly equal in surface to a square of fifteen degrees; an empire, of which I do not mean to assign the precise limits, but which we may consider, for the purpose of this dissertation, as embraced on two sides by Tartary and India, while the ocean separates its other sides from various Asiatic isles of

great importance in the commercial system of Europe. Annexed to this immense track of land is the peninsula of Corea, which a vast oval bason divides from Nison or Japan, a celebrated and imperial island, bearing in arts and in arms, in advantage of situation, but not in felicity of government, a preeminence among eastern kingdoms analagous to that of Britain among the nations of the west. So many climates are included in so prodigious an area, that while the principal emporium of China lies nearly under the tropic, its metropolis enjoys the temperature of Samarkand: such too is the diversity of soil in its fifteen provinces, that, while some of them are exquisitely fertile, richly cultivated, and extremely populous, others are barren and rocky, dry and unfruitful, with plains as wild or mountains as rugged as any in Scythia, and those either wholly deserted, or peopled by savage hordes, who, if they be not still independent, have been very lately subdued by the perfidy, rather than the valour of a monarch, who has perpetuated his own breach of faith in a Chinese poem, of which I have seen a translation.

The word China, concerning which I shall offer some new remarks, is well known to the people whom we call the Chinese; but they never apply it (I speak of the learned among them) to themselves or to their country. Themselves, according to Father Visdelou, they describe as the people of Han, or of some other illustrious family, by the memory of whose actions they flatter their national pride; and their country they call Chum-cue, or the Central Kingdom, representing it in their symbolical characters by a parallelogram exactly bisected. At other

times they distinguish it by the words Tien-hai, or What is under Heaven; meaning all that is valuable on earth. Since they never name themselves with moderation, they would have no right to complain, if they knew that European authors have ever spoken of them in the extremes of applause or of censure. By some they have been extolled as the oldest and the wisest, as the most learned and most ingenious of nations; whilst others have derided their pretensions to antiquity, condemned their government as abominable, and arraigned their manners as inhuman, without allowing them an element of science, or a single art, for which they have not been indebted to some more ancient and more civilized race of men. The truth perhaps lies, where we usually find it, between the extremes; but it is not my design to accuse or to defend the Chinese, to depress or to aggrandize them: I shall confine myself to the discussion of a question connected with my former discourses, and far less easy to be solved than any hitherto started: "Whence came the singular people who long had governed China, before they were conquered by the Tartars?" On this problem (the solution of which has no concern, indeed, with our political or commercial interests, but a very material connexion, if I mistake not, with interests of a higher nature) four opinions have been advanced, and all rather peremptorily asserted than supported by argument and evidence. By a few writers it has been urged, that the Chinese are an original race, who have dwelt for ages, if not from eternity, in the land which they now possess; by others, and chiefly by the missionaries, it is insisted that they sprang from the same stock with the Hebrews and

Arabs; a third assertion is that of the Arabs themselves, and of M. Pauw, who hold it indubitable, that they were originally Tartars, descending in wild clans from the steeps of Imaus; and a fourth, at least as dogmatically pronounced as any of the preceding, is that of the Brahmens, who decide, without allowing any appeal from their decision, that the Chinas (for so they are named in Sanscrit) were Hindus of the Cshatriya, or military class, who, abandoning the privileges of their tribe, rambled in different bodies to the north-east of Bengal; and, forgetting by degrees the rites and religion of their ancestors, established separate principalities, which were afterwards united in the plains and valleys which are now possessed by them. If any one of the three last opinions be just, the first of them must necessarily be relinquished; but of those three, the first cannot possibly be sustained, because it rests on no firmer support than a foolish remark, whether true or false, that Sem in Chinese means life and procreation; and because a tea-plant is not more different from a palm than a Chinese from an Arab. They are men, indeed, as the tea and the palm are vegetables; but human sagacity could not, 1 believe, discover any other trace of resemblance between them. One of the Arabs, indeed (an account of whose voyage to India and China has been translated by Renaudot), thought the Chinese not handsomer (according to his ideas of beauty) than the Hindus; but even more like his own countrymen in features, habiliments, carriage, manners, and ceremonies: and this may be true, without proving an actual resemblance between the Chinese and Arabs, except in dress and complexion. The next opinion