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occasions; on which it may be observed generally, that every body believed, in those days, in divine interference: our traveller, however, voúches for no miracles on his own knowledge, but only repeats what he had been told by the inhabitants of the places where the traditions were current. 2. An apparent belief in the efficacy of magical arts; but this was the common weakness of the times, and none were exempt from its influence. 3. The descriptions of animals out of the ordinary course of nature 4. The statements of the extent and population of the cities in China; 5. of the dimensions of the palaces; 6. of the magnificence and number of bridges; 7. of the military forces; and S. of the amount of the imperial revenues. When to these statements, given in millions, was added the extraordinary story of the black stones used for fuel, it is not to be wondered at that, for centuries after his death, he should be branded as a writer of romance.

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The prominent faults of omission are accusations of modern times; and they are such as Mr. Marsden is disposed to consider as less excusable, if really imputable to himself, and not to the loss of a part of the work, or to the omissions of transcribers. We do not however conceive that any vindication of the author's character is at all necessary on this head, even if the probability was not apparent, that they may have been owing to both these causes. Where is the traveller who has been careful to note down every thing that fell under his observation? Manners and customs, and new and singular objects of nature and art, however strange for a time, become familiar from long residence, and unless noted down while the impression of their novelty was strong on the mind, may well be supposed to escape the subsequent attention of the narraWe can scarcely suppose that Homer was unacquainted with the Pyramids of Egypt any more than with the city of Thebes and its hundred gates, yet no mention is made of the former, while he familiarly speaks of the latter. Herodotus describes the Pyramids from ocular inspection, but never once alludes to the great Sphinx. If, however, we may rely on the chronicle of De Aqui, his contemporary, Marco Polo has himself fully accounted for any omissions that may appear in his narrative. So little credit, says this writer, did he obtain, that when he lay on his death-bed, he was gravely exhorted by one of his friends, as a matter of conscience, to retract what he had published, or at least to disavow those falsehoods with which the world believed his book to be filled. Marco. indignantly rejected this advice, declaring at the same time, that, far from having used any exaggeration, he had not told one half of the extraordinary things of which he had been an eye-witness. Let it be recollected too that his book was dictated in a jail at Genoa from loose notes sent to him from Venice, and we shall not

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be surprized at a few omissions of objects or customs however remarkable. The most important of them belong to China, in which country the greater part of his time was passed. His enemies particularly notice, his silence with respect to the Great Wall-to the cultivation and general use of tea-to the preposterous fashion of bandaging the feet of female children in order to render them small and useless through life--and to the employment of wheel carriages impelled by wind. We may at once discard the last of these, as we believe they are confined to a particular district of the province of Petchelee, and have rarely been seen by any stranger. The other three were certainly familiar to him: he must have seen and even crossed the Great Wall, though at a place perhaps where it is only a mound of earth; but the most perfect and finished part of it is not more than sixty miles from Pekin, and it is there so very similar in construction to that of the walls of the capital and of most of the cities of China, as to cease possessing that attraction which, at first sight, it undoubtedly boasts. Some authors have speculated on its being built subsequently to the time of Marco Polo; and a missionary of the name of Paolino da San Bartholomeo (in a work published at Rome) has boldly fixed on the fourteenth century as the date of its erection :-he might, with equal probability, have asserted that Julius Cæsar invaded Britain in the fourteenth century.

The article of tea has supplied an almost universal beverage to the Chinese from time immemorial, and appears, by the early annals of the empire, to have then, as now, contributed to the revenue; it is mentioned by the two Mahommedans who visited China in the ninth century: the cramping of the ladies' feet too has been a custom from a time to which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.' These things must therefore have been well known to Marco Polo, though he has omitted them in his narrative.

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But it has been the fate of this early traveller not only to be charged with faults of commission and omission, but to have other matters ascribed to him of which he makes no mention, and of which indeed he could have no knowledge. Thus nothing is more common than to find it repeated from book to book, that gunpowder and the mariner's compass were first brought from China by Marco Polo, though there can be very little doubt that both were known in Europe some time before his return. Indeed there is good evidence that the use of the magnetic needle was familiar here long before he set out on his travels; for Alonzo el Sabio, king of Castile, who, about the year 1260, promulgated the famous code of laws known by the title of Las siete Partidas,' has (in the preamble of ley 28, titulo 9, partida 2,) the following remarkable passage: E bien asi como los marineros se guian en la noche escura

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por el aguja, que les ès medianera entre la piedra è la estrella, è les muestra por dō vayan, tambien en los malos tiempos, como en los buenos-otro si, los que han de anconsejar al Rey deben siempre guiar por la justicia. And as mariners guide themselves in the dark night by the needle, which is the medium (medianera) between the magnet and the star, in like manner ought those who have to counsel the king always to guide themselves by justice.'

Now it is obvious that the monarch would not have availed himself of the happy comparison of the office of a faithful counsellor to the magnetic needle, if that instrument had not been generally in use, at the period when he wrote; but how long before that period it had been known, and applied to the purposes of navigation, it may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to ascertain. There were in those times no philosophical journals, no literary gazettes, no reviews to communicate such intelligence to the world; and we are indebted for the little information which has come down to us, to incidental notices by authors not writing expressly on the subject. Thus Guyot de Provins, who is supposed to have lived about the year 1180, evidently alludes to the magnetic needle in the following

verses:

Mais celle estoile ne se muet,
Un art font, que mentir ne püet,
Par la vertu de la mariniere,
Une pierre laide et bruniere,
Ou li fers volontiers se joint,
Ont si esgardent le droite point,
Puis qu'une aguille ont touchié,
Et en un festu l'ont couchié
En l'eue le mettent, sans plus,
Et le festus la tiennent desus:
Puis se tourne la pointe toute,
Contre le estoile,' &c.

Jacobus Vitriacus, bishop of Ptolemais, who died at Rome in 1244, and who composed his Historia Orientalis between 1220 and 1230, after his return from the Holy land, says,- Valde necessarius est acus navigantibus in mari.' He had himself made more than one voyage by sea. And Vicentio of Beauvais (Vicentius Bellovacius) observes, in his Speculum Doctrinale, Cum enim vias suas ad portum dirigere nesciunt, cacumen acus ad adamantem lapidem fricatum, per transversum in festuca parva infigunt, et vasi pleno aquæ immittunt.' Bellovacius died in 1266; how long before his death the above was written we know not. In another passage he seems to hint that the Arabians were the inventors; but this is very improbable: had they possessed the compass when they traded so largely to China in the ninth and succeeding centuries,

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they would not (as they did) have crept along the shores of the bay of Bengal, of Cambodia, and Cochin-china; besides, the name they gave to it (el bossolo) leaves little doubt of the source from which it was derived. The route pursued by Marco Polo from the head of the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulph affords a strong argument against any knowledge of the compass by the Chinese in the thirteenth century; to say nothing of his silence concerning this wonderful instrument, while he so minutely and accurately describes the four-masted vessels on which he and his retinue embarked.

Many other authorities might be quoted to shew that the magnetic needle was in common use among the mariners of Europe before the middle of the thirteenth century. It was indeed then a rude and simple instrument, being only an iron needle magnetized, and stuck into a bit of wood, floating in a vessel of water; in which inartificial 'and inconvenient form it seems to have remained till about the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Flavio Gioia, of Amalphi, made the great improvement of suspending the needle on a centre, and enclosing it in a box. The advantages of this were so great, that it was universally adopted, and the instrument in its old and simple form laid aside and forgotten: hence Gioia, in aftertimes, came to be considered as the inventor of the mariner's compass, of which he was only the improver. The Biographia Britannica mistakes the period of Gioia's death for that of his birth; he lived in the reign of Charles of Anjou, who died king of Naples in 1509. It was in compliment to this sovereign (for Amalphi is in the dominions of Naples) that Gioia distinguished the north point by a fleur-de-lis. This was one of the circumstances by which the French, in later days, endeavoured to prove that the mariner's compass was a French discovery: but to what discoveries will not our ingenious and ambitious neighbours lay claim, after their late attempts to appropriate that of the steamengine, and still more recently that of Mr. Seppings's most important improvement in the construction of ships of war!

That Marco Polo would have mentioned the mariner's compass, if it had been in use in China, we think highly probable; and his silence respecting gunpowder may be considered as at least a negative proof that this also was unknown to the Chinese in the time of Kublai-khan. Be this as it may, there is positive proof that the use of cannon was unknown, otherwise our travellers would not have been employed by the emperor to construct machines to batter the walls of Sa-Yan-Fu. (p. 489.) There is nothing in the history of these people, nor in their 'Dictionary of Arts and Sciences,' that bears any allusion to their knowledge of cannon before the invasion of Gengis-Khan, when (in the year 1219) mention is made of ho-pao, or fire-tubes, the present name of cannon, which are said to kill men and to set fire to inflammable substances: they are said

VOL. XXI. NO. XLI.

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too to have been used by the Tartars, not by the Chinese, and were probably nothing more than the enormous rockets known in India at the period of the Mahommedan invasion. It is clear that Roger Bacon, who died in 1294, was acquainted with the composition, and even with some of the effects of gunpowder, for it is recorded in those of his works which have come down to us. It would, however, be difficult to connect his discovery with the application of it to the purpose of war, by a people apparently unacquainted with the labours of the English friar. The Moors, or Arabs, in Spain, appear to have used gunpowder and cannon as early as 1312. In the Cronica de España by Abu Abdalla, it is said that, el Rey de Granada, Abul-Walid, llevo consigo al sitio de Baza una gruessa máquina, que, cargada con mixtos de azufre, y dandole fuego, despedia con estuendo globos contra el Alcazar de aquella ciudad.' And in 1331 when the king of Granada laid siege to Alicaut, he battered its walls with iron bullets, discharged by fire from machines: this novel mode of warfare, adds the annalist, inspired great terror, y puso en aquel tiempo grande terror una nueva invencion de combate, que, entre las otras máquinas que el Rey de Granada tenia para combatir los muros, llevava pellotas de hierro que se lanzaban con fuego.'*

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It is stated in the Cronica de Don Alonzo el Onceno, cap. 273, that when Alonzo XI. king of Castile, besieged Algeziras in 1342-3, the Moorish garrison, in defending the place- lanzaban muchos truenos contra la hueste en que lanzaban pellas de fierro muy grandes.' That the truenos (literally thunders) were a species of cannon, and fired with powder, is clear from the following passage in the same Chronicle, Los Moros que estaban en su hueste cerca de Gibraltar, des que oyeron el ruido de los trueños, e vieron las afumadas que facian en Algecira, cuidaron que los Cristianos combatian la ciudad.' Mariana mentions the circumstance of the inhabitants defending themselves by tiros con polvora que lanzaban piedras;' and adds that this was the first instance he had found of any mention of the use of such arms.'—vol. vi. p. 54. The celebrated battle of Crecy was fought by Edward HI. in 1346; and Hume, on the authority of Villani, says that the English had cannon, but not the French; it is, however, worthy of remark that, although Villani was a contemporary, yet he composed his history in Italy, and therefore could only speak from hearsay; whereas Froissart, also a contemporary, residing in France, and almost an eye-witness, makes no mention of cannon, although he describes the battle very particularly; and Thomas of Walsingham, who wrote more than three centuries before Hume,+ and who not only gives a very detailed ac

Zurita, Ann. de Aragon, t. ii. lib. 7. cap. 15. f. 99. v. + Ypodigma Neustriæ.

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