While thus claiming for the Chinese the first knowledge and application of the polarity of the needle, we may say, incidentally, that it is now certain that they made numerous other discoveries of importance long before the Europeans. They knew the attractive power of amber in the first century of our era, and a Chinese author said, in 324, "The magnet attracts iron, and amber attracts mustard-seed." They ascribed the tides to the influence of the moon in the ninth century. Printing was invented in the province of Chin about the year 920, and gunpowder would seem to have been made there long before Berthold Schwartz mixed it in 1330. Still, it is not necessary to resort to the argument of analogy to support the claims of the Chinese to this admirable invention: the direct evidence, as we have rehearsed it, is amply sufficient. [Illustration: CHINESE JUNK.] A century ago, Flavio Gioia, a captain or pilot of Amalfi, in the kingdom of Naples, was recognised throughout Europe as the true inventor of the compass. He lived in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and biographers have even fixed the date of the memorable invention at the year 1303. The principal foundation for this assertion was the following line from a poem by Antonio of Bologna, who lived but a short time after Gioia:-- "Prima dedit nautis usam magnetis Amalphis." Amalfi first gave to sailors the use of the magnet. The tradition was subsequently confirmed by the statement made by authors of repute, that the city of Amalfi, in order to commemorate an invention of so much importance, assumed a compass for its coat of arms. This was believed till the year 1810, when the coat of arms of Amalfi was found in the library at Naples. It did not answer at all to the description given of it: instead of the eight wings which were said to represent the four cardinal points and their divisions, it had but two, in which no resemblance to a compass could be traced. Later investigations have, as we have said, completely demolished all the arguments by which the compass was maintained to be of European origin and of modern date. The curious reader will find the extracts from Chinese works which substantiate the Chinese claim, in a volume upon the subject published in 1834, at Paris, by M. J. Klaproth, and composed at the request of Baron Humboldt.