From the observance of such extravagant ceremonies it would not be fair to infer their total ignorance of the principles of astronomy; but that such is really the case, the latter part of their history furnishes abundant testimony. In the thirteenth century, when Gengis-Khan the Mongul Tartar first entered China, and his successor Kublai-Khan effected the conquest of the country, the greatest disorder and confusion prevailed in their chronology. They were neither able to regulate the reckoning of time, nor to settle the limits of the different provinces, nor even to ascertain the divisions of lands as allotted to the several districts. Kublai, according to their own annals, held out encouragement for learned men to frequent his court from every part of the world, and through the means of the missionaries, both of the Christian and Mahomedan faith, but principally the latter, and perhaps still more through the descendants of the Greeks, who anciently settled in Bactriana, many important improvements were then introduced into China. He caused a regular survey to be taken of the whole empire. He adjusted their chronology, and corrected the errors of their astronomical observations; he imported various mathematical and astronomical instruments from Balk and Samarcand; such as were then in use among the Chinese being of a rude construction, and unfit to make observations of the heavenly bodies with any tolerable degree of accuracy; and he repaired the grand communication by water that connects the northern with the southern extremities of the empire, a work, in the contemplation of which the mind is not more strongly impressed with the grandeur and magnitude of the object, than with the pleasing sense of its important utility. In some of the early accounts of China, published in Europe, we find the description of certain instruments, said to have been discovered on a mountain near the city of Nankin, and afterwards placed by the Chinese partly in that capital and partly in Pekin. On a more accurate examination of those instruments it appeared, that they had all been constructed for some particular place lying under the 37th parallel of latitude; from whence it followed, that all the observations made with them at Pekin, which is in 39° 55'. north, as well as all those made at Nankin in 32° 4'. north, must have been entirely false: and the very act of placing them so distant from the parallel for which they were constructed, is in itself a sufficient proof of the ignorance of the Chinese in matters of this kind. Mr. Pauw has given the most probable conjecture respecting those instruments. He supposes them to have been made at Balk, in Bactriana, by some of those Greeks who obtained the government of that province under the successors of Alexander, and that they had passed into China during the period of the Mongul government.