From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between Egypt or Chaldæa, and China. The most remote epochs in the history of China do not belong to antiquity as we have defined the term. Without knowing it or wishing it, all those nations included in our plan laboured for their neighbours and for their successors. Read as a whole, their history proves to us that they each played a part in the gradual elaboration of civilized life which was absolutely necessary to the total result. But when China is in question our impression is very different, our intellects are quite equal to imagining what the world would have been like had that Empire been absolutely destroyed centuries ago, with all its art, literature, and material wealth. Rightly or wrongly, we should not expect such a catastrophe to have had any great effect upon civilization; we should have been the poorer by a few beautiful plates and vases, and should have had to do without tea, and that would have been the sum of our loss. * * * * * The case of India is different. Less remote than China, bathed by an ocean which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldæa, Persia, Greece and Rome, she was never beyond the reach of the western nations. The Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks carried their arms into the basin of the Indus, some portions of which were annexed for a time to those Empires which had their centre in the valley of the Euphrates and stretched westwards as far as the Mediterranean. There was a continuous coming and going of caravans across the plateau of Iran and the deserts which lie between it and the oases of Bactriana, Aria, and Arachosia, and through the passes which lead down to what is now called the Punjab; between the ports of the Arabian and Persian gulfs and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a continual commercial movement went on which, though fluctuating with time, was never entirely interrupted. From the latter regions western Asia drew her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea route.