*

coveries; and they were not long in exploring the British Channel, and making themselves familiar with the Scilly Islands, and the western extremity of Cornwall,† both of which abounded in tin, a metal peculiar to no other country. When they first reached the British Isles is uncertain, as already intimated; but as tin is mentioned by Moses, 1,500 years before the Christian era, we know it must have been at an early period. Here they found the Druids, who were already the peaceful teachers of their peculiar religion in these islands, for they "had been the wise men of the west ever since it was first peopled, and from the period that our Celtic parents brought the fundamentals of their religion, when they imported their own persons and families into Gaul; though at later periods they modified some particulars, and adopted some innovations." The immigration or importation here spoken of must have happened, I conceive, immediately after Belus and his descendants, the great corruptors of the system of faith established by Noah, had introduced those idolatries among their subjects of the Greater Asia, and which became at length common both to the Israelites and Canaanites, the latter name having been given to the Phoenicians on account of their commercial habits. After the dispersion at Babel, the heterogeneous mixture of the principles of the true and false religion above noticed, and formed in the school of Chaldea, was carried into Persia, where the Magi or priests believed and taught that the sun was the image of the Creator and Governor of the Universe, and worthy to be honoured with eternal worship and devout prostration. From the Magi of Persia the idolatrous infection spread to the Brahmins or priests of India, by whom also the sun was held in the greatest veneration; and who, spreading themselves widely through the northern regions of Asia, as before glanced at, gradually mingled with the great body of the

Anciently Cassiterides "a Greek word signifying tin, and which is the exact translation of the Phoenician Baratanic, or Britain, the land of tin. The original British appellation of these islands is said to be Sylleh, or rocks sacred to the sun; a circumstance by no means improbable, when we consider the monuments of the solar superstition yet remaining among them."-(Maur. Ind. Antiq., vol. vi., p. 285.)

+ Diod. Sic. calls this part of England Belerium, after more ancient classical writers, (lib. v., cap. 22), This is doubtless the original name, which Ptolemy (Geog. Ab. iii, cap. 3) miscalls Bolerium-the Promontory of Hercules-the Hercules of Assyria and India, the Founder of Tyre, whose two principal deities were the Sun and Moon, "the one under the name of Baal, or Belus, whose symbol was fire, and the other under that of Astarte, the Ashtaroth of Scripture, who were represented in the great temple of Hercules at that city."-(Maur. Ind. Antiq. vol. vi., p. 251.)

Numbers xxxi., 22.

§ Davies' Celtic Researches, p. 145.

Celtic tribes of Europe, and finally established the superstitious system of those eastern priests in this island, and which is known at the present day as the Druidical theology of ancient Britain. Upon this system the Phoenicians grafted the worship of their Baal, by erecting the unhewn stone pillar to his honour, which Dr. Borlase suggests was the ancient idol both of the cast and the west, and symbolical of the sun, and worshipped as such; the very name of this great Asiatic deity being intentionally concealed in the appellation, o-bel-isk-a designation by which the single stone is not unfrequently known. To such erections the Israelites, who were ever prone to idolatry, were strongly prohibited to offer homage" Ye shall make you no idols or graven images, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down to it." + The necessity of this command was too apparent in the subsequent conduct of the Jews, when they took possession of Canaan; for they soon fell into the very evil they had been so strictly commanded not to commit. In Britain, too, the homage paid to these stones in early times, was continued even so late as the seventh century of the Christian era; at which time many persons continued to worship them, to pay their vows, and devote their offerings at the places where they were erected. Nay, in the Scottish isles at the present day, so superstitious are many of the inhabitants, that when they come to one of these stones, they invariably walk three times round it, from east to west, according to the course of the sun, bowing three times, and repeating three solemn prayers; thus offering to the inanimate erection the very homage that was paid to it, probably, five and twenty centuries ago!

"It is impossible to doubt, that at some remote period, the two orders were united, or, at least, were educated in the same grand school with the magi of Persia and the seers of Babylon."- (Maur. Ind. Antiq. vol. vii., p. 50.) Keysler expressly affirms that the Dervish of the East, and the Druid of the West, are the same character, under names but little varied.-(See Antiq. Septentrion, p. 36.)

+ Leviticus xxvi.-1.

TO BE CONTINUED.]

China* Opened.

FOR Some centuries past, the internal concerns of Asia, social and political, have been engaging but a small share of the attention of Western nations, who regarded it merely as a great gold-field, free and open to the strongest hand. At intervals, a curious antiquarian, an enthusiastic missionary, a mercantile or political adventurer in search of wealth or power, made known to a few readers the results of his experiences of the East; but, as a popular question anywhere, those speculations have been urged forward into notice only within the past few years, and by the great and agitating excitement of war. With the exception, perhaps, of the time of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the present, more than any other period of our history, is animated by the discussion of oriental politics and society. The indifference, too, was reciprocal: until this recent date, the old ante-historic, stagnant conservatism of eastern nations had been slumbering on, awaking now and then to gaze in stupid and contemptuous wonder at the busy and restless savages of the West,† and sinking to sleep again, after receiving no deeper impression from the contrast than an additional feeling of self-complacence in the superiority of their own stereotyped institutions. The tenacity with which Asiatics in general-Chinese and Hindus in particular-adhere to ancestral notions, would be sufficiently illustrated by a few prominent facts selected from many that might be adduced the identity, for instance, of most of their social and religious customs with those prevailing in the time of the Hebrew Patriarchs, and the circumstance that, although Asia contains two-thirds of the human race; and, although the condition of the great mass of that population is such as would seem to render emigration desirable; still, three centuries and a half passed away after the discovery of the new world, before any one Asiatic colonist had settled upon that virgin field of enterprise. This superstitious exclusiveness is, of course, no more than a tradition of that old, legendary, and picturesque civilization, the evidences of which are limited to a few allusions in the ancient classics, some literary reliques as yet but partially explored, and many monuments of art in that elaborate

:

* China is the name given to the country by the first European visitors, and is derived from the Persian Chin, signifying "silk." The name used by the natives is Chong-qua, literally "the central region," which they once supposed it to be.

The first European visitor to China, was Fra Paolo, a Venetian Jesuit-better known as Paullus Venetus-late in the 13th century. The formal discovery is generally attributed to the Portuguese.

and falsely decorated style, which indicates the decline of a national taste, originally simple and correct.

Of that old civilization, which once pervaded the central and southern regions of Asia, the Chinese, by the peculiarities of their political system, have been enabled to preserve more, in actual practice, than the Hindus or Persians; but, the intellectual cultivation and the proficiency in literature and science which were, some twenty-six centuries ago, in advance of the rest of the world, have remained where they then were; and the knowledge which was at that time a power and a miracle, is now the simplicity of childhood. In those days, the alliance of China was courted by the then decaying power of Persia: at a later period, its victorious arms first trained to war and afterwards turned loose upon the west those irresistible Huns who hastened the downfall of Imperial Rome. Later still, when Bertezena founded the Turkish monarchy upon the ruins, not of Roman valour, but of Byzantine luxury, he solicited, as an important element in his success, the hand of a Chinese princess. That their civilization, though less ancient than the claims of a mythical chronology,* was of considerable antiquity and no contemptible refinement, is among the plainest inferences from authentic history. We know that when Heliogabalus purchased, for their weight in gold, the silk robes that scandalized Pliny, the people of China wore it more commonly than we do now; that, when the philosophers of Greece were still sneering at the chimerical theory, that the sun appeared on the right hand of navigators sailing to the west, the Astronomers Royal of China were acquainted with the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, and competent to take sidereal observations and measure cycles of years: that, before the laws of the XII Tables were compiled in Rome, there existed in China a perfect ⚫ municipal organization and a complete system of inland navigation. We know also that, at a time when the classic literature of the ages of Pericles and Augustus was either a mystery to the ignorance, or a terror to the superstition of medieval Europe, the walls of Nankin were placarded with advertisements of improved lanterns and bills of new dramatic entertainments; that paper, printing, and gunpowder were familiar, though undeveloped, facts in the land of flowers, long before they excited the wonder of Europe as new inventions, and altered the whole aspect of its military and civil institutions; and that, for centuries before the Amalfitani discovered the polarity of the needle, it guided the Chinese mariner beyond the sight of beacon and pharos.

When it is added to all this, that they have enjoyed, ever since the *Said to begin 2,207 years. B.C.

time of our Saxon Heptarchy, what we claim as a new system of national education and competitive examination as a test of competency for public employment; it may appear, at first sight, somewhat unaccountable, that they are just now so immeasurably distant from the point where we stand with reference to a really practical civilization. In this respect, their position is a problem for which political philosophers have been suggesting a variety of solutions, all more or less unsatisfactory: such as, their long exemption from war and want of collision with other nations; the absence of a hereditary aristocracy; a minute interference of the law with all the formalities of life and all the complicated relations of society, which proscribes all innovation and consequently interdicts all improvement; the difference between their oral and written language, and the cumbrous and intricate nature of the latter, which resembles musical notation rather than alphabetic writing. Such are the principal causes which have been adduced to account for that old-toryism in taste and fashion, which, side by side with a veneration for mental accomplishments, ignores the barbarism of perspective in painting, regards artificially clubbed feet as a principal element in feminine beauty, which discards eyebrows and dyes the face yellow, which commences dinner with the dessert and concludes it with the joints, and bids the company signify that the repast is ended, by placing their chop-sticks on their heads.

Well! we know that all those causes, taken together, must operate powerfully in dwarfing the mind of a nation; and, that the political isolation of China, for many generations past, has resembled that of an individual long secluded from the world, an adept in all that can be acquired of book learning, filled with opinions formed without contradiction and theories adopted without experiment, but, helpless and childlike in all that relates to the actualities of life. It is also true that the prohibition by law of all change or modification in such particulars as domestic architecture, costume, and even in the ceremonies of salutation and social intercourse, is capable of creating a servile monotony of thought, analogous in some degree to the moral stagnation which a narrow intolerance of another kind is at present inducing upon some European nations. Taking into account, however, those particulars in which the Chinese mind is free to exercise itself, against those in which its movement is restricted, we shall find, after a fair computation, that absurdity in conventionalities and credulity in superstitions, are merely relative ideas and afford no reliable test of mental development; and, that, the state of society in which the philosopher is likely to discover the smallest amount of either, must be sought in a state of progress, where civilization has