centuries ago, subsequently brought to a perfection which leaves all
European attempts hopelessly out-classed.

In many instances the Chinese seem to have been so near and yet so far.
There is a distinct tradition of flying cars at a very remote date; and
rough woodcuts have been handed down for many centuries, showing a car
containing two passengers, flying through the clouds and apparently
propelled by wheels of a screw pattern, set at right angles to the
direction in which the travellers are proceeding. But there is not a
scrap of evidence to show what was the motive power which turned the
wheels. Similarly, iron ships are mentioned in Chinese literature so
far back as the tenth century, only, however, to be ridiculed as an
impossibility; the circulation of the blood is hinted at; added to which
is the marvellous anticipation of anaesthetics as applied to surgery, to
be mentioned later on, an idea which also remained barren of results for
something like sixteen centuries, until Western science stepped in and
secured the prize. Here it may be fairly argued that, considering the
national repugnance to mutilation of the body in any form, it could
hardly be expected that the Chinese would seek to facilitate a process
to which they so strongly object.

In the domain of painting, we are only just beginning to awake to the
fact that in this direction the Chinese have reached heights denied to
all save artists of supreme power, and that their art was already on
a lofty level many centuries before our own great representatives had
begun to put brush to canvas. Without going so far back as the famous
picture in the British Museum, by an artist of the fourth and fifth
centuries A.D., the point may perhaps be emphasized by quotation from
the words of a leading art-critic, referring to painters of the tenth
and eleventh centuries:--"To the Sung artists and poets, mountains