(_c_) Yung Loh, the first Chinese Emperor who possessed _ts’iang_, or cannon, had agents in Malay, Delhi, Herat, and Mecca,[313] and his agent in the latter city could hardly have failed to hear of, and report on the use of firearms in the West. If such were the case, there was nothing to prevent the Emperor from obtaining small guns by land, or guns of any size by sea. There had been communication by land between China and Europe from the time of the early Roman emperors of the West.[314] It was seriously interrupted, no doubt, by the disorders which broke out in China at the close of the ninth century, but it was re-established when they came to an end in the middle of the thirteenth.[315] Mr. F. Hirth proves in his “China and the Roman Orient” that there was communication by sea between China and Europe at a very early date. Masudi speaks of the communication in his own time, the tenth century. The Arab and Chinese ships met, he says, at a port called Killat, half-way between Arabia and China, where they transhipped their cargoes.[316] There was constant communication between China and the west coast of India in the first half of the fifteenth century. Abd ur-Razzak says the men of Calicut were bold navigators, and adds that they were called (in compliment) “the sons of China.” When John Deza destroyed the Zamorin’s fleet there, it was commanded by a Chinaman, Cutiale.[317] (_d_) The Chinese made their charcoal from young shoots of the willow in the eighteenth century,[318] and “as they seldom change anything,”[319] they probably did so from the beginning. Twigs of willow are recommended for this purpose by Roger Bacon and Hassan er-Rammah (pp. 149, 24.) (_e_) The Chinese strained the mother-liquor of their saltpetre through straw;[320] so also did Whitehorne (A., p. 20). (_f_) They employed animal glue, or charcoal, to remove the insoluble impurities of the mother-liquor,[321] just as Bacon did, if the explanation of the word “Phœnix” given in Chap. VIII. be accepted (p. 154). (_g_) They incorporated the ingredients of gunpowder on a _marble_ slab,[322] as directed by Marcus Græcus, recipes 4 and 13, for incendiaries, and by Arderne for gunpowder (p. 177). (_h_) They passed their rocket composition through a sieve of fine silk,[323] the counterpart of Arderne’s “sotille couerchief” (Ib.). (_i_) They occasionally added camphor and mercury to their powder,[324] like Kyeser and many other westerns (Romocki, i. 157). (_j_) They called their powder _yo_, “the drug,” as did the Germans, Danes, and Dutch (p. 6). (_k_) They used varnishes,[325] of the same family as the _lutum sapientiæ_, Marcus Græcus, recipe 1.