After 1500 three new Cultures begin--first, the Indian, in the upper Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho; and then, about 1100, the Classical, on the Ægean Sea. The Chinese historians speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia, Shang, and Chóu in much the same way as Napoleon regarded himself as a fourth dynasty following the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and the Capetians--in reality, the third coexisted with the Culture right through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the titular Emperor of the Chóu dynasty became a state pensioner of the “Eastern Duke” and when in A.D. 1793 “Louis Capet” was executed, the Culture in each case passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the later art in exactly the same relation as Mycenæan to Early Classical pottery and Carolingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and Chinese springtimes, with their “_Pfalzen_” and “_Burgen_,” their knighthood and feudal rulership, can be seen the whole image of our Gothic, and the “period of the Great Protectors” (Ming-Chu, 685-691) corresponds precisely to the time of Cromwell, Wallenstein, and Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world. The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the “Period of the Contending States”; it culminated in a century of unbroken warfare between mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and out of it came the “Roman” state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780 and 1580, of which the last century was the “Hyksos” time. The Classical experienced it from Chæronea (338), and, at the high pitch of horror, from the Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C.). And it is the destiny of the West-European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period the centre of gravity changes--as from Attica to Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern province of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants of those days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the existence of India they had as yet no notion.