husbands; and “the air of a Chinawoman,” says Mr Lay, “has a majesty about it which is only compatible with sentiments of freedom; and the tone of her voice, and the glance of her eye indicate a consciousness that she was not born to be despised.” The existing monuments of ancient civilisation in China are not of the same kind as those of Egypt and Assyria, of Greece and Rome. Time has spared the mighty structures of these latter empires, as if in compensation for having buried the nations that reared them; but in China, where the dynasties have succeeded one another without interruption, and the people have gone on increasing in numbers, down to our own day, the wars which have swept over it, and the revolutions which have shaken it, have destroyed almost all the monuments which would have attested its former magnificence. We refer particularly to the great revolution effected by the Emperor Che-hoang-te, (about 246 A.C.), who, for political purposes, ordered the destruction of every monument of the past, whether in metal, in stone, or on paper,—a proscription which lasted for nearly a century, and which left comparatively little to be regained by the most persevering researches of after ages. Nevertheless, the early ages of the Chinese empire seem to have been distinguished by not a little science, and many rare discoveries. In their carefully kept ancient annals, we have full particulars of the circumstances attending an eclipse of the sun, which happened 2155 years before Christ; and in the reign of Shun, a century before this, we read of “the instrument adorned with precious stones, which represented the stars, and the movable tube which served to observe them”—words which plainly indicate a celestial sphere, and a telescope, of some kind or other. After speaking of the discussions which took place in Europe last century, in regard to the high antiquity of astronomical observations in China, M. Pauthier remarks,—“All that we know of the reigns of the philosophical emperors, Yao, Shun, and Yu, and of the state of astronomical science in their time, justifies the supposition that, in the days of those emperors, sure methods were known for calculating beforehand the precise date of eclipses of the sun and moon, and all that concerned the calendar.” Another piece of knowledge possessed by the ancient Chinese, which is calculated to astonish our modern astronomers and mathematicians, is that not merely of the general spherical shape of the earth, but of its oblate form, in consequence of the flattening of the poles. We have not space to set forth the grounds we have for holding it probable that they really were acquainted with this recondite fact in physics; we must hasten on to add that the _Sacred Book of Annals_ mentions facts which indirectly prove that music, poetry, and painting were known from the earliest historic times of China, and we know for certain that in the days of Confucius, the