THE head of the Ka family was richer than the Duke of Chow had been, and yet K'ew collected his imposts for him, and increased his wealth. The Master said, "He is no disciple of mine. My little children beat the drum and assail him."-Confucian Analects. Yao went to visit Hua. The border-warden of Hua said, "Ha! a Sage. My best respects to you, sir. I wish you a long life." "Don't!" replied Yao. “I wish you plenty of money,” continued the border-warden. "Don't!" replied Yao. "Long life, plenty of money, and many sons," cried the warden; "these are what all men desire. alone do not want them?" How is it you "Many sons," answered Yao, "are many anxieties. Plenty of money means plenty of trouble. Long life involves much that is not pleasant to put up with. These three gifts do not advance virtue; therefore I declined them." "At first I took you for a Sage," said the warden, "but now I find you are a mere man. Heaven, in sending man into the world, gives to each his proper function. If you have many sons, and give to each his proper function, what cause have you for anxiety? "And similarly, if you have wealth, and allow others to share it, what troubles will you have?"-Chuang-tze. "I have heard of men using the ways of our great land to change barbarians, but 'I have not yet heard of any being changed by barbarians."- Mencius. PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS. CHAPTER I. THE LAND AND ITS HISTORY. THE natural history of Egypt may be said to begin and end with the inundation of the Nile, but it is impossible to give so compendious an account of the conditions which enable the soil of China to maintain onethird of the human race. The fortunes and history of China are mysteriously linked with the geology of Central Asia; and the interdependence of the different members of the favourite Chinese triad-Heaven, Earth, and Man--is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the experience of the Chinese people. Chinese history traces the fortunes of a race, with qualities determined by one set of conditions, in a country with qualities determined by another set. So far as the character of the Egyptian race is the product of the sun and the inundation, the history of the land and the people have a common cause. But there is no such natural connection between the inexhaustible fertility of the loess districts in China and the character of the Chinese race, for the former is the result of causes which ceased to work long before the ancestors of the latter came into being. The two great tracts of ceaseless sun, which are barren both of civilized human life and vegetation, are the deserts of Central Asia and the Sahara. Both these deserts occupy the site of a dried-up inland sea-dried up because, in the course of ages, the waste by evaporation from its wide surface was greater than the reinforcements brought by the streams debouching into it. The Nile flows from the mountains of Abyssinia and the equatorial highlands round Lake Victoria,1 the Tigris and Euphrates from the highlands of Armenia and Kurdistan, all alike outside the rainless regions. The streams which may once have fed the inland African sea had no such sheltered sources, and have hardly left a trace behind. The sea of Central Asia existed perhaps to a more recent date, and there still survives, to show how it was fed, the Yarim or Yarkand River, which flows into Lop-nor, after a course of 1,150 miles, longer than that of the Rhine, and through a river-basin larger than that of the Danube. But 1 In the latter region the annual rainfall sometimes reaches Ico inches. with this exception, the streams that flow from the little lakes still scattered through the desert, lose themselves in the sand; others, rising in the sand, flow only into lakes, which year by year waste and dwindle, like the larger sea of which they once formed part, while the surrounding mountains have long since ceased to nourish tributaries of sufficient volume to reach them. When, from whatever cause, the amount of evaporation over a given area comes to exceed the rainfall, the radiation from the heated, barren surface, of which more and more is left permanently dry, tends to disperse the summer rainclouds, and so extends and intensifies the drought. Prejevalsky saw this process at work in the desert of Gobi, between Alashan and Naga, where a dog, which had been his companion for years, died of the intense heat. No dew fell, and the rainclouds dispersed without sending more than a few drops to earth. "We observed," he says, "this interesting phenomenon several times, particularly in Southern Alashan, near the Kansu mountains, where the rain, as it fell, met the lower heated atmosphere and passed off in steam before reaching the earth.” 1 The drying-up of an inland sea extends the area over which moisture is absorbed or dissipated, quite apart from the causes which have led to its own contraction. This in Central Asia may have been due partly to the gradual elevation of the sea bottom, which leaves the plateau of Gobi three or four thousand feet above the sea level, as well as to the insufficiency of its fresh-water feeders. After wringing their last drops of moisture from the currents of air flowing towards the interior, and already desiccated by long journeys overland, the great mountain ranges surrounding the central basin send all the drainage of their high lakes or snow-capped summits outwards to the distant ocean, instead of towards the Mediterranean sea of sand. They intercept, instead of storing up, the rainfall which might replenish the central basin. The fact is that Central Asia presents too large and solid a surface to be uniformly watered. Northern Africa is riverless except for the Nile, which does but skirt its eastern edge; the solid interior of Australia is barren ; Europe and North America are perforated with seas and gulfs, though the latter is not without an example, in the Great Salt Lake district, of the way in which deserts may be formed. South America at its widest is narrow enough for such a river as the Yang-tse-kiang to almost traverse its whole breadth, while its mountain system allows the middle of the continent to be watered by streams flowing north and south with overlapping sources. In Asia alone we have a continental block, extending over some sixty degrees from north to south, and as much from east to west. The Indus, the Oxus, the Obi, the Yenisei, the Lena, the Amour, the Hoangho, the Yang-tse-kiang, the Brahmapootra, and the Ganges are all streams, for length and volume, of continental importance; but, with the one ex 1 Mongolia, the Tangut Country and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet, being a narrative of three years' travel in Eastern high Asia. Lieut.-Col. N. Prejevalsky (Eng. trans., 1876), p. 267. |