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114 ance. But it is plain from our analysis of Chinese character, that we must go behind the statistics of population to solve this question. The physical circumstances of the masses, indeed, fail to stimulate them to progress; but the national type itself presents positive drawbacks to the charms of growth. What has been called the idealism of this people is not contempt for material things, but preoccupation of the ground by fixed formulas and habits, held absolute and unimprovable. A primitive simplicity constantly taught and pursued ; adherence to conventional formulas of number on which every thing in the universe is constructed, and which predetermine the forms of analysis so that there can never be more nor less than so many elements ; intentness of a concrete habit on petty details ; religious objections to the use of dissection, or other interference with the dead body ; and the inevitable plodding that must result from following prescribed rules, — are illustrations of this foreclosure of scientific progress. Behind all this is the great uniformity of the Chinese type itself, due to its comparative isolation. Moreover, though comprising many elements in its Chinese form, this Mongolic blood lacks the live chemistry of commingling qualities, and the mobility of resources that need not to repeat their forms. To the physiological distinctness of the race has of late been added a deliberate withdrawal from the magnetism of commercial relations ; so that its progress, which with all these drawbacks was by no means insignificant, has been seriously checked. Japan, but a few years since more hostile to foreign influence than China, has a bolder outlook and swifter conversion.

But the old inventions that illustrate Chinese labor must not be forgotten, nor the great and happy civilization that has been built on them, transmitting them to us also, and starting us on the track of many noble sciences and arts. "If the importers of silk," says Gibbon,