condition of the Grand Canal, which has doubtless been its condition for a century or more, is an eloquent witness to arrested development due to failure to apply hydraulic improvements.
While giving due credit for what they have done, we feel justified in concluding that the arts and the inventions of the Chinese do not, after all, witness to any degree of scientific attainment among them. Many of the later modern inventions of western people are the result of applied science, which certainly was not the case with these early inventions of the Chinese. There seems, however, to be room for a difference of opinion even among authorities. In 1839 G. T. Lay asserted in writing about Chinese musical instruments:
It has been declared that the Chinese have no science, but of a surety, if we advance in the free and scholar-like spirit of antiquarian research, we shall be obliged to set our feet upon the head of this assertion at every step in our progress.
And yet in his authoritative work, Williams closes his rather compendious account of "Science among the Chinese" with this summary:
On the whole it may be said that in all departments of learning the Chinese are unscientific; and that while they have collected a great variety of facts, invented many arts, and brought a few to a high degree of excellence, they have never pursued a single subject in a way calculated to lead them to a right understanding of it, or reached a proper classification of the information they possessed relating to it.
It may be of interest then to notice some of the leading ideas in what we may call "Chinese science" and to inquire into the causes of China's scientific backwardness as compared with modern western knowledge. In doing this we shall be largely indebted to Williams's "Middle Kingdom" for many of our facts and to Martin's "Lore of Cathay" for suggestive lines of thought.
II. The Content of "Chinese Science"
1. Anatomy.—Wylie has noted fifty-nine Chinese treaties in medicine and physiology (some of them belonging to the earliest days), many of which contain good sense and sound advice amid the strangest theories. Harland has lucidly and in detail described the Chinese ideas (apart from the gradually spreading foreign teaching) concerning the organization of the body and the functions of the chief viscera—false ideas which a very little dissection, a prohibited practise, would have banished. We shall not pause to consider these, but merely note that the most curious is perhaps their idea of the liver, which they place on the right side of the body.
