project of destroying all the records of the country, in order that its history might commence with his reign. Accordingly there was a general conflagration of all the books in the empire excepting such as treated of medicine or agriculture. Thus, say they, was the empire thrown back into a state of barbarism, for a period of about sixty years, when under a new and more favourable dynasty the love of letters began to revive. Sixty years, it must be admitted, is a very short period for so multitudinous and highly polished a people to have lost all traces of their modern as well as ancient literature-but to proceed with their story. High rewards were offered to any one who should discover a copy of the ancient records, and particularly of the hundred chapters of the Shoo-king compiled by Confucius; but no copy could be found. Its short sentences were then, as they now are, got by heart and fixed in the memory of all who aspired to the character of learned; but after a lapse of sixty years most of those who knew the Shoo-king were either dead or had lost the recollection of it. At length, however, a man of the name of Foo-seng, more than ninety years of age, was discovered, who at one time could repeat the whole of the Shoo-king by heart, and still retained a considerable portion of it. To this man, now become too feeble to leave his home, was despatched one of the historiographers of the empire. The old man was wholly unable to write the characters of the language, and his articulation was so imperfect that the historian was unable to discriminate the syllabic sounds which require uncommon nicety of pronunciation to free them from ambiguity. This inconvenience, however, was removed in a certain degree through the medium of Foo-seng's daughter, who, first receiving the words from her father, afterwards repeated them to the historian. In this manner they got through about twenty-nine books or sections of the Shooking, which however Foo-seng had condensed into twenty-five, and here they were obliged to stop, the infirmities of Foo-seng not permitting him to proceed.

This part of the Shoo-king, thus recovered, did not, it seems, obtain the implicit belief of the learned, yet a multitude of copies were written out, and anxiously sought after, from a desire of comparing those passages which they recollected to have heard their fathers repeat and this doubtful fragment of the Ancient History of China was the only remaining document of the annals of that country at the period of about 130 years before Christ! Confessing so much, the, Chinese, however, have still a resource left to silence the objections of the sceptical. About this period a prince of Loo (in whose territories Confucius was born and his descendants still lived) had the unexpected good fortune, in clearing away an old building to erect on its site a temple in honour of

the sage, to discover in the midst of one of its walls an imperfect copy of the Shoo-king, together with two other works of Confucius. They were very much devoured by worms; the character in which they were written, was very ancient, entirely out of use, and not understood. This, to be sure, sounds rather oddly to us barbarians of the western world, and would seem to imply that the present language of China was invented since the days of Confucius, or that in his time very few could read and write the character then in use. The learned of the empire were summoned, the copy of the newly discovered Shoo-king laid before them, and collated with the fragment taken down from the recollection of Foo-seng, and after much time and labour, they were found to differ very little excepting in the divisions of the chapters. Having thus hit upon the key for deciphering the obsolete characters of Confucius, they at length obtained twenty-nine complete chapters in addition to those twenty-nine recollected by Foo-seng, making the fifty-eight sections of which the Shoo-king is composed.

Still, however, the continuation of the Shoo-king or Tehun-seou, which brings down the annals of China to the philosopher's own time, was wanting; a copy of it was produced from some of the remote corners of the empire, whither it had been conveyed by one of the historiographers of the court. Encouraged by the acquisition of so many important documents, the Emperor Han-ou-tie offered by proclamation considerable rewards for all manner of records that should be brought to the magistrates of the respective provinces. A mass of materials poured in from all quarters; a commission was appointed to examine them, at the head of which was placed Tse-ma-tan, who, at his death, was succeeded by his son Tse-ma-tsien, who lived to complete the history of the empire, collected from the documents so procured, and obtained the appellation of The Restorer of History. From this period, being about a century before the Christian era, down to the present time, their annals we believe have been continued without interruption; and their fidelity, as far at least as the succession of emperors is concerned, is corroborated by the existence of a corresponding succession of the coins of each reign.

Such is the story of the early records of China as told by the Chinese themselves, to which an European reader will not readily yield implicit credence. If however the facts of that history are uncorroborated by the concurrent testimony of contemporaneous historians, it must be allowed that they remain also uncontradicted. Confucius was contemporary with Herodotus, but Herodotus knew nothing of China, and Confucius knew nothing but of China; we are left therefore to form our judgment from the probability and consistency of the facts that are narrated. If we believe that Shee

hoang-tee ordered the books of the empire to be burnt, and accomplished that order, we must also believe the number to have been very few, and limited to a very few persons, and even then it would appear incredible that such an order should be accomplished over the whole of an empire of 1400 miles in length and 1200 in breadth. It was little short of a miracle that the only book in which the records of 3000 years nearly had been preserved, should be saved, and that when found after such a lapse of years, the character in which it was written should be unknown and obsolete, and that the only key to decipher it should be found in the recollection of an old man of ninety. We must ground our belief of the authenticity of the whole history of China, prior to the time of Confucius, on this man's recollection, and on the obsolete document, to which it afforded a key; and after all this we must believe that Confucius did write, and possessed authentic inaterials for writing, this Shoo-king thus miraculously recovered. In short, believing all this, we must conclude the mighty empire of China to have been in a state of gross ignorance and barbarism, and that literature had made little or no progress in the time of Confucius. The extraordinary homage paid to his memory more from long custom than any merit which his writings possess, is some proof of the paucity of sages and philosophers that existed before or since his time. Indeed we may venture to say, that no man, in any age or nation, has acquired so eminent a station in the temple of fame with so slender a portion of desert as the Chinese sage; and that there is to be found more worldly wisdom and a more intimate knowledge of the human heart in a single chapter of Solomon, than in the seven hundred pages of Mr. Marshman's Lun-gnee already published, and, we predict, in the seven hundred more with which we are threatened; but to know this is a point gained, for which we are indebted to Mr. Marshman's extraordinary perseverance in surmounting difficulties that would appal men of ordinary minds, and which perhaps after all, will not be deemed worth the pains they have cost in conquering them.

If, however, Mr. Marshman has laboured to little purpose as a translator, he has, without expressly intending it, conferred on us a benefit of a higher nature. His work is indeed the best of satires on that foolish or malignant admiration which has so long laboured to persuade the western world, that their literature and religion are but childishness in comparison of the wisdom and illumination of the great Confucius, and that the antiquity of the divine records is but of a late date, when contrasted with the countless ages of the authentic history of China.

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ART. VI. 1. Practical Observations on Ectropium, Artificial Pupil, and Cataract. By William Adams, Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, Oculist Extraordinary to his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, &c. &c. Svo. London. 1812. pp. 268; with three Plates.

2. Official Papers relating to Operations performed by Order of the Directors of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, for the Purpose of ascertaining the general Efficacy of the new Modes of Treatment practised by Mr. Adams. 8vo. London. 1814. pp. 25.

THE

HE opinions of practical surgeons have never yet been perfectly unanimous with respect to the different modes of operating in diseases of the eye: and the difficulty and delicacy of the subject cannot be better illustrated, than by the comparison of these successive publications, in the first of which the ingenious author has described a new, and apparently successful mode of removing the opaque crystalline lens in cases of cataract, intended universally to supersede the practice of extraction, which has been adopted by the best modern oculists; while he informs us in the second, after an interval of less than two years, that wherever the cataract is hard, he now finds it most eligible to extract it at once, but by a process totally different from the common operation; and he is so confident of the merit of this improvement, as to assert, 'that it possesses the utmost degree of excellence which it is possible for extraction to arrive at. These expressions are certainly strong; but, although we can scarcely form a conjecture respecting the nature of this new and secret operation, we are not unwilling to admit the force of many of the inventor's reasonings, and the apparent superiority of the success of his practice. We have never been amongst the warmest advocates for indiscriminate extraction; and we think it not improbable, that the objections which have been made to some of Mr. Adams's operations, as being frequently followed by a violent and dangerous inflammation, may already have been partly overcome by his late improvements, and may hereafter be still further obviated by the dictates of his future observation and experience.

For the ectropium, or eversion of the eyelid, which, from the redness and thickening of the inverted part of the exposed membrane, constitutes a very disagreeable kind of deformity, as well as a very painful disease, a variety of operations have formerly been attempted with partial success. Mr. Adams appears to have afforded his patients more complete relief, by shortening the borizontal length of the eyelid, so as to bind down the parts beneath, as closely as possible; the disease being observed to produce an

elongation of the eyelid and its integuments, which, in the usual practice, has almost universally been the cause of a relapse. In order to obtain the object of shortening the eyelid, when the tumefied parts of the membrana conjunctiva have been removed, he cuts out, with a pair of scissars, near the external angle, a triangular piece of the tarsus and its integuments, and connecting the parts by a single ligature, causes them to unite so effectually by the first intention, as to ensure the permanence of the arrangement thus made, and of a sufficient degree of pressure to prevent a renewal of the disease.

The operation for making an artificial pupil, where the natural one has been either closed or too much contracted, or where a partial opacity of the central parts of the cornea requires a lateral opening in the uvea, had been attempted in various ways by former oculists, but with so little success, that the most experienced surgeons in modern times scarcely ever practised or encouraged it. Mr. Adams has revived the operation practised and recommended in such cases by Cheselden, but since abandoned; having modified in some degree the form of his instruments and the mode of their introduction, so as to prevent the escape of the humours, and to divide the uvea more effectually. He finds that such a division, in the direction of one of the diameters of the iris, is generally sufficient for allowing the fibres to retract, without removing any part of their substance, and that in this manner a pupil may be formed, which is sufficiently large for every purpose of vision: and in order the more effectually to secure its permanency, where the disease is complicated with cataract, he generally places some fragments of the lens, or its capsule, 'as a plug,' in the newly formed pupil. Mr. Ware seems of late to have had frequent success in repeating the operation thus revived by Mr. Adams, though he had before been induced by the reports of other oculists to disapprove it. The cases, which admit of relief from the formation of an artificial pupil, are much more frequent than might be supposed, the disease being not uncommonly mistaken for gutta serena, an incurable affection of the optic nerve.

But the most important of the operations on the eye, as the most frequently required, and affording the most effectual relief, are those which are performed for the cure of cataract. Couching, or depressing the opaque lens backwards into the vitreous humour, was formerly the universal practice in such cases; and the facility, with which this operation is performed, would give it an advantage over all others, if it were not liable to the objection, that the lens or its fragments are generally forced back in a few days into their natural situation by the elasticity of the neighbouring parts, when the vitreous humour retains its natural organization.