To these primitive civilizations of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Susa we might, if we could put faith in native records, be inclined to add a fourth. [Sidenote: China.] The _Chinese_ profess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best record of early times _then_ is to be found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable number, which were collected into a book--the _Book of Odes_--by their sage Confucius.[49] The picture which these odes present is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their earliest book--the _Book of Changes_--dates, that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these imply, had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving life, not devoid of piety and domestic affection. But it should be mentioned here that recent researches seem to point to the conclusion, strange as it may appear, that the Chinese civilization is closely connected with that of the Accadians, and may have had an origin from some contact with the Accadian peoples in their earliest homes in Central Asia. In any case it hardly seems likely that this can be classed as the fourth civilization which may have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built. But it is without doubt after these three the next oldest of the civilizations which the world has known. It seems to be remote alike from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of Egypt and Chaldæa. To these early civilizations in the old world, may we add any from the new, and believe in a great antiquity of the highest civilization of the _red_ race? The trace of an early civilization in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldæa, is undoubted. This _may_ have been passed on by the Chinese at a very early date. But there is nothing to show that the identity in some of the features of their culture extended to an identity in their respective epochs. [Sidenote: Assyrians, Phœnicians, Hebrews.]