kings contemporary with Moses, or before him. This nation and its
institutions have outlasted everything. The ancient Bactrian and Assyrian
kingdoms, the Persian monarchy, Greece and Rome, have all risen,
flourished, and fallen,--and China continues still the same. The dynasty
has been occasionally changed; but the laws, customs, institutions, all
that makes national life, have continued. The authentic history of China
commences some two thousand years before Christ, and a thousand years in
this history is like a century in that of any other people. The oral
language of China has continued the same that it is now for thirty
centuries. The great wall bounding the empire on the north, which is
twelve hundred and forty miles long and twenty feet high, with towers
every few hundred yards,--which crosses mountain ridges, descends into
valleys, and is carried over rivers on arches,--was built two hundred
years before Christ, probably to repel those fierce tribes who, after
ineffectual attempts to conquer China, travelled westward till they
appeared on the borders of Europe five hundred years later, and, under the
name of Huns, assisted in the downfall of the Roman Empire. All China was
intersected with canals at a period when none existed in Europe. The great
canal, like the great wall, is unrivalled by any similar existing work. It
is twice the length of the Erie Canal, is from two hundred to a thousand
feet wide, and has enormous banks built of solid granite along a great
part of its course. One of the important mechanical inventions of modern
Europe is the Artesian well. That sunk at Grenelle, in France, was long
supposed to be the deepest in the world, going down eighteen hundred feet.
One at St. Louis, in the United States, has since been drilled to a depth,
as has recently been stated, of about four thousand.[9] But in China these
wells are found by tens of thousands, sunk at very remote periods to
obtain salt water. The method used by the Chinese from immemorial time has
recently been adopted instead of our own as being the most simple and
economical. The Chinese have been long acquainted with the circulation of