of ancient and modern coins, has given the missionaries, and credulous travellers such great cause for wonder and amaze. ment, should have experienced no difficulty, with the assistance of the Mandarin Tsiang, president of a learned academy, in ranging these ancient coins in the proper order of the dynasties, is not astonishing in the least, for it is surely as easy a matter for the emperor and court, to make one absurdity consonant with another, as to unite a history of preceding ages which never existed; or establish the belief of it by the dread of strangulation and of torture. This supposition is authorised by the facts alone, and the difficulty of otherwise accounting for such a coincidence; for it is certain that the coins could not be referred to their respective reigns in which they were struck, by the mere vague inscriptions on the face of them, and some of them destitute of any. But in support of this opinion, we shall cite the account of the missionaries themselves, who not unfrequently contradict their own statements, as is apparent in this instance. Father Du Halde, after noticing the loss of all the coins of the first dynasties, or of the earliest ages of the empire, says: "But they have supplied this deficiency with PASTEBOARD MONEY, made according to the idea the ancient books give thereof. The proportions are so well kept, and the colours of the metal so well imitated, that THIS COUNTERFEIT COIN SEEMS TO BE TRULY ANCIENT." The ancient books he here mentions are the fabulous histories of which we deny the authenticity, at least it is reasonable to apprehend that they are of the same complexion, and entitled to the same degree of credibility. Here is an exposure of an imperial cheat, which would sanction any allegations of deceit, falsehood, and fabrication; and we cannot hesitate to believe, that a people and prince so totally devoid of truth and honesty in the advancement of their interests, and the gratification of their vanity, would be studiously pertinacious in sustaining what they had once advanced; and would never relinquish any dogma or absurdity, which would tend to elevate them in the eyes of others, or please their vanity, by conceited superiority.

In the detail thus terminated, of the claims of the Chinese to so great antiquity, we have studied as much conciseness as was

consistent with perspicuity, on a subject which is interesting only to very few, and to many arid and unpleasing. Their assertions we have endeavoured to disprove, by the facts which were accessible to us, without adhering to the restraints of system, which we disregarded because our aim was truth. That these facts are not always as full and explicit, as philosophy might desire, or indolence wish, is rather to be ascribed to the policy of the government, which is the subject of them, than to want of inquiry or attention in the travellers who have visited the court of China, or explored the country. Indeed much more is expected from this people, than they possess to give; and as whatever is hid from research, by the restraints of care or jealousy, is magnified by the imagination to an unnatural bigness, so the paucity of objects in China, respecting science, arts, history, politics or poetry, has, by being withheld from the inquiries of the curious, augmented to possessions, which if real would stamp them the first of nations; but which by diminishing to barbarity, in the pregnancy of hope and expectation, lessens even the importance they deserve to hold in our estimation, as a people, debased by tyranny, immersed in superstition, and sunk in vice.

From these considerations, it is apparent, that it would prove no less difficult to conjecture the precise date of their origin, or settlement in China, than to account for the origin of the American aborigines; for as one part of their history is equally entitled to credit with another, and as all of it abounds in fables, and is disgraced with puerilities, there is no ground left on which a supposition might reasonably be formed. Some light however may be elicited from a comparison of the Tartars with the Chinese, from which they are evidently descended, as their features, nature and constitution sufficiently evince them to be of one common stock; and that China was anciently settled by the wandering hordes of this people, who were impelled by necessity to seek for that subsistence abroad, which the immensity of their numbers, and the sterility of the soil, denied them at home; and which,

"Drove martial horde on horde with dreadful sweep,
"And gave the vanquish'd world another form."

An industrious traveller, in proof of this similarity and identity of the Tartars and Chinese,* has given in his work several inscriptions in the Tartar character, which were discovered on a rock, which from its situation and form, he conjectures to be a sepulchre; these characters have a great resemblance to the Chinese in their form, though they are less complicated; and denote a language inferior in copiousness and refinement to the Chinese, though obviously derived from the same root of hieroglyphic symbols. But he draws a curious inference from this coincidence, imagining that the Chinese in the earliest ages, sent colonies into Scythia and Tartary, which in the course of time was too closely assimilated with the natural Scythians, to be discriminated. This conjecture is however highly improbable; for who would migrate from the congenial and friendly plains of China, where a comfortable subsistence might be obtained with less labour, and enjoyed with more happiness, to the cold and sterile soil of Tartary and Scythia, where labour is scantily recompensed, and enjoyed with discomfort? It is likewise more natural that language should acquire refinement, as age and civilization advanced, than that it should degenerate by change of clime, or become simplified by the sagacity of exiled barbarians. Nor is there any reason to conclude, that China was at 80 early a date, crowded with inhabitants to so great a degree as to induce them to quit their native country, for either want or convenience in foreign parts: and to exchange the renovating beams of a summer sun, for the frigid regions of the north.

Had the clime of Italy been as unpropitious to the disposition and wants of man, as the country of the Scythians, Huns, and other northern nations who inundated the Roman empire in the fourth century, Rome instead of being subverted by barbarians, would have been probably left to self-annihilation, by her vices and voluptuousness. But the deliciousness of its climate invited invaders from less congenial soils; and as the possession of wealth entices the robber to his prey, did the salubrity of the Roman empire lure the arms of the north to its destruction.

* Strahlenburgh, p. 376. In which work the curious reader will find many antiquifies corroborative of this theory, and much to interest and gratify

him.

And to the same causes may we not ascribe the conquest of China by the Tartars, in the thirteenth century; for though the e restless and turbulent disposition of this people is proverbial, it is rendered highly probable, that they never would have made an effort to subjugate China, had not the softness and fecundity of the country promised a happy recompense, and the vices and dissentions of the people, given expectations of a successful issue.

At what precise period the Chinese descended from the heights of Tartary, to settle and cultivate the plains of that fruitful and extensive country, cannot now be ascertained, and the paucity of authentic facts on which to make an opinion, prevents even conjecture from fixing with any reason and certainty the precise date. But what can be known, is very unfavourable to the high age they claim; but as our arguments on this object will be founded on truths which have been ridiculed by some, and by many wholly disregarded in their passion for novelty, theory, and system, they may appear to some as the ebullitions of a pious devotion, instead of the reasoning of a philosopher. Yet as we hold these two characters not only compatible, but absolutely inseparable, we prefer incurring the disapprobation of men, to the displeasure of infinite benignity.

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It is a fact remarkable for its extreme discrepance with the sentiments and professions usual with the unfathomable profundity of a certain description of historians, and its repugnance to reason, that those who are the most captious and skeptical, should in some instances, be the most passive and credulous. This anomaly is not however, hard to explain. Bishop Berkley imagined he had demonstrated the non-existence of a material world, and from thence induced conclusions favourable to the in mortality of the soul, and corroborative of the truth of Scripture, and the nature of God! Mr. Hume from the same premises infers a conclusion totally opposite. That the contrariety of their inferences ought to be ascribed to nothing but the bias on the mind of each, and their anxiety to establish a system, who can doubt, when they understand the subject? Thus we find geniuses of the greatest acumen and learning, betrayed into the same prejudices which they profess to avoid, and which the ig

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norant and unlearned would not imbibe; and skeptical philosophers have in this spirit been led into the most absurd belief of extravagant fable, even while they were rejecting the highest incontestible, infallible truths on record, those of the divine writings. Perhaps it did not accord with their propensities, or their pride, to allow what was most palpable, and the transposition of a word, or the error of a date, were sufficiently demonstrable, in their estimation, and highly gratifying to their desires, to invalidate the authenticity of a history, whose precepts were repugnant to their passions, and whose predictions destroyed their professed hopes of annihilation.

Gibbon is the foremost in the train of Voltaire, D'Alembert and co. to declaim with petulance and puerility against the truth of scripture; and in consonance with this disposition we find him ridiculing the possibility of events therein recorded. He cannot comprehend the prodigious increase of populousness in the German and northern nations so soon after the flood, and though it is apparently repugnant to his reason to affirm them to be Indigene, or the spontaneous production of the earth, yet he is rather willing to allow, what he acknowledges irrational, than to adhere to the truth of the books of Moses, which affirm Noah and his family, to have been the regenerators of the human race. It is not surprising therefore, that he should readily allow the early populousness of remote China, without his usual preciseness of inquiry, or cavilling propensity; Voltaire had done the same before him, and it must surely indicate superior acumen, and keenness of wit, to follow in the track of the prince of infidels.* Indeed, in the declamations of the whole tribe, raillery is substituted for reason, and inclination for conviction; there is little to be perceived, which even the most abandoned can admire, but much to deprecate and abhor. Those endued with genius, have not exhibited it on this theme; and it is an extraordinary fact, that here alone they appear to more disadvantage, than those less favoured in their faculties on other topics; nor do they appear the least so, on that of the Chinese antiquity.

* Voltaire was chosen president of the Economists in Paris, a society of philosophers, in an abused sense of the word, whose labours and endeavours were the destruction of religion, and the abolishment of all order, subordination and distinction; but those of wit, and learning, and debauchery!