that the record of facts in Scripture does not come under the guarantee of its inspiration? we are not so to conclude;" "that they are inspired in all matters of faith and morals, meaning thereby not only theological doctrines but also the historical prophetical narratives which they contain from Genesis to the Acts of the Apostles ;" and the Cardinal repudiates the imputation "that the Bible, so far as it is historical, does not in my view proceed from inspired writers." His Eminence also says: "I have distinctly avowed the inspiration of the whole of its history," and "in all matters which Scripture delivers after the manner of historical narrative, we must hold as a fundamental fact the truth of the history."

Now the whole scheme of redemption depends upon the promises made to Abraham, and Abraham is only removed by ten generations from Noah, the names of his progenitors being recorded with the minutest particularity. If we are bound to believe in Abraham, how are we not also bound to believe in Noah? If belief in Abraham compels belief in Noah, how can we believe in him without believing, so to speak, in his surroundings, in what is intimately connected with his history, the ark and the flood? For all these histories and statements we have one and the same authority. If the "bona fides" of Moses is not to be trusted in his enumeration of the ten intervening generations, and if his account of Noah and the flood is fiction or legend (e.g. a mere reminiscence of the subsidence of Atlantis), how can we believe in the "bona fides" of the narrator in respect to Abraham? From all this I infer that the history of Noah and the Deluge is one of the cases in which "the Almighty in His Revelation of Himself to us" "might undertake the office of an historian," because "the secular matters bear directly upon the revealed truth," and because "the manner and bearing of the sacred writer is historical" (Cardinal Newman).

Although it does not enter into the subject matter of my theory as to Plato's Atlantis, I may say as regards the universality of the Deluge that I quite concede that Père Motais, in his skilfully constructed argument, has fully shown that its extent is an open question. Indeed, I may say that I have so regarded it since the Bishop of Clifton (Dr. Clifford) intervened in the controversy in the Tablet, and with the weight of his authority and his arguments declared it to be so; and if it is the fact that the works of Vossius, of whom our Charles II. said that he believed in everything except the Bible, were not placed on the Index, the discussion must have been left open from a much earlier date. If, therefore, I still venture to retain the opinion of the universality so far as the human race is concerned, it is upon the traditional ground which I consider to be scientific ground, and in the belief

that the historical evidence and preponderance of the argument is on that side.

It seems to me that the advocates of the theory of non-universality appear always to think that their case is proved, when they have shown that it is tenable. It cannot, however, both be true that all mankind were drowned except Noah and his family, and that the Cainite race remained unaffected by it. If a decision is ever pronounced it must declare one of those views to be true and the other false, and in the interim no one will venture to say that the older belief is untenable from the theological point of view.

And from this point of view I would give a caution to any disciple of Père Motais, who should too implicitly rely upon his expression, "Judging from the quotations and from Lord Arundell's own opinions, its (Mr. Donnelly's) conclusions might be safely accepted" So far as my opinions are concerned Père Motais must have imperfectly apprehended them from a too hasty perusal. If, however, any disciple should not only proceed to formulate Père Motais' theory, of which we only know at present that it "can be conceived in a very Catholic manner quite different from Mr. Donnelly's" (an expression hardly reconcilable with the above), but upon Père Motais' averment should accept Mr. Donnelly's theory as orthodox, I must point out to him that he would bring all the labours and theories of the learned theologian to a "reductio ad absurdum." For Père Motais having shown that from the earliest ages there has been grave discussion among the Fathers as to the interpretation of Genesis and with reference to the Deluge, having followed the exegesis through the works of the theologians of the medieval schools, and having thus after his own method decided-1, that the Deluge was not universal in extent geographically; 2, that it was not universal as regards the animals; and 3, that it was not universal as regards the human race, he would ultimately have arrived at the conclusion that there was no deluge at all-i.e. if it is finally made to appear that he adopted Mr. Donnelly's theory, according to which there was no deluge such as is related by Moses, but that the account of the Deluge so related was only the legendary reminiscence of a deluge which occurred "9000 years before, and for which we have only the statement of Plato and the asseveration of Mr. Donnelly.

ARUNDELL OF Wardour.

ART. VII.-PRESENT POSITION OF CHINA.

1. Wanderings in China. By C. F. GORDON CUMMING. London: William Blackwood & Sons.

1886.

2. Russian Travellers in Mongolia and China. PYASETSKY. London: Chapman & Hall.

3. Les Chinois Peints par Eux-mêmes. TCHENG-KI-TONG. Paris: Calmann Levy.

4. China. Von FERDINAND FREIHERN Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. 1882.

1884.

By P.

Par le Colonel

VON

1884.

RICHTHOFEN.

5. Im Fernen Osten. VON GUSTAV KREITNER. Wien: Alfred Hölder. 1881.

6. The River of Golden Sand. By Captain WILLIAM GILL, R.E. London: John Murray. 1883.

7. Travels and Researches in Western China. By E. COLBORNE BABER. Supplementary Papers. Roy. Geog. Soc. 1882.

8. China. By JOHN HENRY GRAY, M.A., LL.D. London: Macmillan & Co. 1878.

HE Ultima Thule of the East presented itself to early geo

THE graphers under a dual aspect. When reached by the ocean

highway from the south, it was designated in all ages by some form of its present appellation, such as Sin or Tchin, but when entered by the more northerly trans-continental route, it was known to classical antiquity as Seres, and to the Middle Ages as Cathay, a corruption of the name Kitai, still applied to it throughout Russia and Central Asia. To a Jesuit explorer, Benedict Goes, despatched for that purpose by his superiors in 1603, belongs the credit of having established the identity of the two regions, at the cost of his own life. Dying at Suhchow, the first Chinese town reached by him, his epitaph was pronounced by one of his brethren in the phrase, that "seeking Cathay he had found heaven." He left as a legacy to mankind the first knowledge of the colossal scale of an empire extending over sixty-one degrees of longitude and thirty-four of latitude, and with its dependencies occupying an area of four and a-half millions of square miles, or a twelfth of the entire land surface of the globe. Corea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Kuldja, Kashgaria, Kokonor, and Tibet are all included in the vast dominions, of which Annam until very recently also formed part. But, taking only the imperial nucleus

of this heterogeneous accretion of states, we find China proper running British India close as to size, while far exceeding it as to population, since its 383,000,000 of inhabitants occupy the respectable area of 1,348,870 square miles. This space, half that of Europe, seven times that of France, and fifteen times that of Great Britain, is divided into provinces on the scale of kingdoms, the smallest being somewhat larger than Portugal, and the largest a little less than Spain.

Its entire great area is occupied, with the exception of a few remote mountain districts, by an absolutely homogeneous race. Nowhere else is a physiognomy at once so strongly marked and so uniform stamped on so large a section of the human family, seeming as though nature, weary of individualizing on so vast a scale, had used the same die for all the myriads from the Great Wall to the Gulf of Tonquin, and from the Yellow Sea to the edge of the great Tibetan scarp. Such ethnological uniformity is the more remarkable in a region partitioned off into a series of mountain-locked compartments deeply impounded between long jutting ribs articulated to the vertebral system of the central continent. The plateau elevation of the Western China highlands declines from the 15,000 feet of altitude attained by the Pamir and the Tibetan plain and the 10,500 of the Kokonor steppe, to 3,000 and 6,000 feet for the Shansi tableland, and 5,000 to 7,000 feet for that of Yunnan. These uplands of the interior are shut off by barrier ranges from the alluvial regions of the coast, the most extensive of which is the great Delta Plain of the north, deposited by the turbid floods of the Yellow River, and still encroaching on the sea at the rate of 100 feet a year. Its bifurcation encloses the isolated mountainous peninsula of Shantung ("East of the Mountains "), and its outstretched arms clasp seven hundred miles of seaboard.

Through this mighty flat the tawny Whang-ho, thick with the scour of Mongolia, tramples its way at will, the author of such havoc as to have earned from the dwellers on its shores the name of the "Sorrow of Han." Nine times in 2,500 years has it chosen for itself a fresh path to the sea, the thirty-fourth and thirty-ninth parallels being its limits of oscillation. The last change occurred in 1851-53, when, after protracted floods, submerging the plains, it broke into the bed of the Ta-tsing river, and shifted its course from the south to the north of the Shantung peninsula. The Yellow River, notwithstanding its majestic length of 2800 miles from its source in the "Sea of Stars" in Kokonor to the Gulf of Pe-chi-li, is closed by sand bars and rendered useless for navigation.

The more beneficent stream whose lower course bisects China rises in the same mountain system, the two basins being less than

fifty miles apart. After having borne many names in its Tibetan wanderings, this river in its course through Western China is known as the Kin-sha-Kiang, or "River of Golden Sands," from the precious metal found in small quantities in the detritus of its bed. Next designated as the Ta Ho, or "Great River," it finally becomes the Yang-tse-Kiang, the "Child of the Ocean," with whose waters it mingles in an estuary 200 miles long. This main artery of Eastern Asia, with a length of 3,000 miles and a drainage area of 900,000 square miles, affords a navigable highway for 1,700 miles of its course, of which the 600 from Shanghai to Hankow are actually traversed by large sea-going steamers, and the 360 miles thence to Ichang by river steamers of light draught. At Hankow, 680 miles from the sea, its stream has still a width of 1,100 yards, and discharges, according to Captain Gill's estimate, at least a million cubic feet of water a second. This point, where it receives its largest navigable tributary, the Han, is a great centre of inland communication, and the triad of cities at the confluence, Hankow, Hanying, and Woochow, have an aggregate population of 1,200,000 souls.

The Se-Kiang, or "West River," flowing past Canton, is navigable by light steamers for 350 miles, and by junks for 300 miles higher to the borders of Yunnan; while 150 miles of its affluent, the Pe-Kiang, or "North River," are available for steamers of small draught. The Pei-ho, or "White River," after doubling and winding through the dusty flats near the capital, the highway of boats and junks innumerable, reaches the sea near the treaty port of Tientsin, the "Ford of Heaven," where its estuary is joined by a number of converging streams. Into one of these debouches the Yuen-liang-ho, the "Graintribute River," or Grand Canal, which, leading thence to the Yang-tse-Kiang, constitutes a waterway between Peking, the "Northern Capital," and the "Southern Capital," or Nanking. Its principal function was to bring fleets bearing the annual tribute of about 270,000 tons of grain from the provinces to Peking. For this purpose, however, it has been abandoned, the tribute junks going round by sea, and, having been allowed to fall into disrepair since the injury inflicted on it by the great floods of the Hwang-ho, it is now little better than a foul and stagnant ditch. It is part of a great system of intersecting watercourses, natural and artificial, extending like a network over the littoral plains. As, however, the Chinese have never invented the device of the lock, the clumsy expedient of a "haul over" has to be substituted, boats being dragged up or down a sloping bank from one level to the other.

The alluvial plains, with their minutely subdivided channels of irrigation, form some of the most productive regions of the globe,