prodigies that are recorded, as well as the fanciful names that are given to their first emperors, carry with them the most unquestionable marks of fabrication. National vanity and a love of the marvellous have influenced in a similar manner the early history of most other countries, and furnished materials for nursery tales, as soon as the spirit of sober investigation has supplanted that appetite for wonders, which marks the infancy of nations, as well as of individuals. The person called Fo-hi, and some of his immediate successors, appear to have been of the number of those gifted men, who rescued the human race from primeval barbarism, and whom their gratitude has invested with superhuman attributes. All institutions and inventions, of whose real origin no history remains,[1] have been referred to them as to a common source; but the grave appellation of Emperor is only applied by the ignorant and the unthinking, to savages who first taught their cotemporaries to make fishing nets, to till the ground, and live together in a state of society.[2]
In order to prove how little dependence can be placed on the accounts which the Chinese give of their own antiquity and inventions, I need only produce the following quotation from the abstract of history given by Du Halde. "Chuen-hiŏ regulated the calendar, and desired to begin the year the first day of the month in which the sun should be nearest the 15th degree of Aquarius, for which he is called the author and father of the Ephemeris. He chose the time when the sun passes through the middle of the sign, because in this season the earth is adorned with plants, trees renew their verdure, and all nature: seems re-animated. This of course means the spring season. Now Chuen-hiŏ is said to have lived more than two thousand years before Christ, and according to the usual mode of calculating the precession of the equinoxes, the sun must have passed through the 15th of Aquarius, in his time, somewhere about the middle of December.
This strange blunder might very well have been expected from a Chinese historian, but that Du Halde should have quoted it, without any comment,
- ↑ "All they relate concerning the progress of the arts and sciences, is an incongruous mass of fictions. Every thing with them is produced as if by enchantment: and events succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity; but the greatest absurdity consists in attributing all inventions of that nature to princes, who we know have few opportunities of making discoveries."—De Pauw, Preliminary Discourse on the Egyptians and Chinese.
- ↑ "At this time," says a Chinese author, speaking of Fo-hi, "men differed but little from brutes; they knew their mother, but not their father."—See Du Halde.
