The polarity of the loadstone was observed in China over a thousand years before the Christian era. One of their emperors, it is said, provided certain foreign ambassadors with "south-pointing chariots," so that they might not go astray on their way home. To this day the magnetic needle in China continues to be called by a name which means that it points to the south. It heads a long list of contraries in the notions of the Chinese as compared with our own, such, for example, as beginning to read at the back of a book; placing the seat of honor on the left hand; keeping to the left 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.]