We might allege our incompetence for such an extended task, which would be enough to occupy several lives. But we have a still more decisive reason. Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China belongs to the antiquity which we have defined, and as for Indo-China and Japan they are but annexes to those two great nations; religion, written characters, the industrial and plastic arts--all came to them from one or the other of those two great centres of civilization. So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible. Down almost to our own days China and its satellites had no dealings with the western group of nations. It is a human family which has lived in voluntary isolation from the rest of its species. It is separated from western mankind by the largest of the continents, by deserts, by the highest mountains in the world, by seas once impassable, finally, by that contempt and hatred of everything foreign which such conditions of existence are calculated to engender. In the course of her long and laborious existence China has invented many things. She was the first to discover several of those instruments and processes which, in the hands of Europeans, have, in a few centuries, changed the face of the world; not only did she fail to make good use of her inventions, she guarded them so closely that the West had to invent them anew. We may cite printing as an example; nearly two hundred years before our era the Chinese printed with blocks of wood. On the other hand, every useful discovery made in the period and by the group of nations to whom we mean to confine our attention, from the time of Menes and Ourkham, the first historic kings of Egypt and Chaldæa, to the latest of the Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others than its authors, and forms, so to speak, part of the public wealth. A single alphabet, that which the Phœnicians extracted from one of the forms of Egyptian writing, made the tour of the Mediterranean, and served all the nations of the ancient world in turn for preserving their thoughts and the idiom of their language. A system of numerals, of weights and measures, was invented in Babylon and travelled across Western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through the mediation of the Greek astronomers and geographers, has given us the sexagesimal division which we still employ for the partition of a circumference into degrees, minutes and seconds.