< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu
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SCIENCE AMONG THE CHINESE

The zoological grouping is as crude and unscientific as that of plants, though the sixteen zoological characters in the language are not so far astray from being true types of classes as the eleven botanical ones, and these groups, though containing many anomalies, are still sufficiently natural to teach those who write the language something of the world around them.

The properties of the objects spoken of are discussed in a very methodical manner, so that a student can immediately turn to a plant or mineral and ascertain its virtues.

3. Geography.—A few sentences from Williams's "Middle Kingdom" will show the state of geographical knowledge among the Chinese prior to western influence.

Their geographical knowledge is ridiculous. Maps of their own territories are tolerably good, being originally drawn from actual surveys made by nine of the Jesuits, between 1708 and 1718, and since that time have been filled up and changed to conform to alterations and divisions. Before the day of western influence, and even long after, to a great extent until the present decade, in fact, the Chinese did not teach geography in their schools, even of their own empire. The common people have no knowledge, therefore, of the form and divisions of the globe, and the size and position of the kingdoms of the earth. Their common maps delineate them very erroneously, scattering islands, kingdoms and continents, as they have heard of their existence at haphazard and in various corners beyond the frontiers. . . . Their notions of the earth 's inhabitants are equally whimsical. . . . Charts for the guidance of the navigator, or instruments to aid him in determining his position at sea, the Chinese are nearly or quite destitute of; they have retrograded rather than progressed in navigation, if one judges from the accounts of their former trade with ports in the Persian Gulf, on the Malabar coast, and in the Archipelago.

Of course in the modern schools now under way throughout the empire correct geographical notions are being taught; but such schools have been so few up till 1900 and the total number of modern students so small even since then, that the notions of the common people are still subject to Williams's characterization. To what extent even the supposedly more intelligent are still "at sea" in such matters is well shown by two recent cases, which illustrate also some effects of presentday scientific ideas upon Chinese minds educated according to the methods which have prevailed in China for ages.

At the Shansi University, in discussing the search for the North Pole, a holder of the Chinese first degree seriously suggested that when the ship had proceeded as far north as possible, the pole might be seen with the aid of a telescope. Another man thought of the same expedient, but considered that the curvature of the earth would render it impossible, and suggested that ascending in a balloon might afford the opportunity to use the telescope to see the pole. Still another man thought it would be simpler first to moderate the climate of the polar regions by planting trees along the way there, and by diverting the gulf

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