Thus the sovereign received some part of whatever was useful or valuable in the country, whether it was the natural production of the soil, or the result of the industry of the people. Yet what each contributed towards the support of government was inconsiderable, the value of it in money being not more than about eighteen-pence or two shillings per head. CHAPTER IX. GRANARIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD. The storehouses or granaries now in use in Mexico, Peru, and other empires, are not the Pyramids which were built and used in the time of Joseph and Moses. A recent traveller gives the following description of a modern granary situated near Canton, in China:— “Here we saw a large magazine for grain; it was a quadrangular building about 350 feet each way, lined on the outside with plank, and on the whole appeared well adapted for the intended purpose. Such depôts for corn, they (the Chinese) tell us, are very common everywhere, yet, except in this instance, they have hitherto escaped our notice.” From what the same traveller says about some remarkable rocks that he saw in China, there appears to be every likelihood of finding pyramids in that country which, built by Moses and his followers during their sojourn there, still remain unopened after all these ages, even by the present generation of the Chinese, who conquered the country from the colonists left in the empire by the Law-giver. These solitary rocks were situated in plains surrounded by corn-fields, similar to the situation and position of the Pyramids of Egypt and Mexico. The traveller says:— “In the course of the day we passed by one town and three villages (proceeding towards Canton from the south), likewise several remarkable rocks, nearly perpendicular on all sides, and about two hundred feet high, perfectly isolated, and unconnected with any elevated ground whatsoever; besides, the circumjacent country is low, level, alluvial soil, _well cultivated_. “All these circumstances considered, it is rather difficult to account for the existence of such a phenomenon as these solitary rocks, so remote, too, from any mountain, unless, perhaps, those prodigious masses of solid stone have been, at some very remote period of time, each the nucleus of a hill, in which case they must have been below the surface of the soil, which, being gradually washed down and carried away by the floods, these rocks became denuded, and left exposed in their present situation.