Whether the burning of the works of the learned in China did or did not happen, appears, as already observed, to admit of some doubt; but the antiquity, and the authenticity, of the five _king_, or classics, seem to be sufficiently established. And considering the early periods in which they were written, they certainly demonstrate a very superior degree of civilization. It has been observed that, in this country, the arts, the sciences, and literature, are not progressive; and the five _king_ would lead one to conclude, that they have rather even been retrograde than stationary. The names of these works are: 1. _Shoo-king._ A collection of records and annals of various princes, commencing more than 2000 years before Christ. 2. _Shee-king._ Odes, sonnets, and maxims; most of them so abundant in metaphor, and so obscure, that much of the sense is to be made out by the translator. 3. _Ye-king._ The perfect and the broken lines of _Fo-shee_; the most ancient relict in China, and perhaps the first attempt at written language: now perfectly incomprehensible. 4. _Chung-choo._ Spring and autumn. The history of some of the kings of _Loo_: the work principally of _Cong-foo-tse_. 5. _Lee-kee._ Ceremonies and moral duties. A compilation of _Cong-foo-tse_. The lines of _Fo-shee_ puzzled even the great philosopher of the country, who declared himself dissatisfied with all the explanations of the commentators. The learned and ingenious Leibnitz fancied he discovered in them a system of binary arithmetic, by which all the operations and results of numbers might be performed, with the help of two figures only, the cypher or zero 0, and an unit 1, the former being considered as the constant multiple of the latter, as 10 is of the unit. Thus 1 would stand for 1, 10 for two, 11 for three, 100 for four, and so on. It is unnecessary to observe, with how many inconveniences such a system would be attended when reduced to practice. This discovery of the binary series, which the mathematician, in all probability, considered only as a philosophical plaything, was communicated to Father Bouvet the Jesuit who, happening at that time to be engaged in decyphering the lines of _Fo-shee_, caught the idea and in an extacy of joy proclaimed to the world that Leibnitz had solved the _Fo-sheean_ riddle.