The Chinese undoubtedly reached a high degree of culture earlier than all the historical nations, and still they are in a state of civilised infancy. They possess reliable historical records referring to periods when branches of the Aryan group of humanity were still nomads. They knew that our globe is flattened at the poles, at a time when we thought it to be a square supported by pillars; they were acquainted with the properties of the magnet-needle; worked metal; cultivated the mulberry-tree, systematically fed the silk-worm with its leaves, weaving its product into the very best silk. In pottery they have attained the greatest perfection so far as the material is concerned. In engineering they were not less clever. They have aqueducts, executed with great daring; innumerable bridges span their rivers; they drained and irrigated the land at a time when other people assumed a universal deluge; and yet they remained babies in thoughts and customs, whilst they grew older and older in age. They have all the manners of precocious children with prematurely aged faces. This phenomenon can be explained in figures. There are 400,000,000 of Chinese, nearly all Turanians. Taking an equal number of Aryans, we shall find that they are not less than 3,400,000,000 cubic inches short of brain, of which each inch represents a certain amount of intellectual force. This deficiency in ‘brain-force’ shows itself in their totally different development, and the stationary character of their institutions. They ingeniously _play_ in science, art, politics, and religion. 4,500 years ago they reached a high degree of civilisation, and they remained stationary in their civilised childhood, which they preserve with a pious veneration. To look back, to believe that the past was better than the present, has become the static law of China, and has checked every progress. Their language is agglutinative, only one degree higher than the savage monosyllabic, and forms a link between this and the flexible languages. The 450 monosyllables are used to form 1,230 word-sounds, out of which they compose from 40,000 to 60,000 compounds. They cannot pronounce certain consonants, resembling in this some badly-taught European children. They say: ‘Yoo-lo-pa’ instead of Europe; ‘Ya-me-li-ka’ instead of America; ‘Ma-li-ya’ instead of Maria; ‘cu-lu-su’ instead of crux; ‘Ki-li-tu-su’ for Christus. Their mode of writing has developed from pictorial signs. They preserved these; and, although arbitrary characters have supplanted picture-writing, or hieroglyphs, they still retain the clumsiness of this form, and have for every word a special sign. Notwithstanding these drawbacks they possess an encyclopædia in 5,000 volumes, and a collection of works of fiction amounting to 180,000 volumes. They can boast of a Socrates in Confucius, of a Plato in Mem-tsu, and of a Xenophon in Tsem-tsu.