576 IGNORANCE OF THE CHINESE.

They have powder, but it is of no strength. They have neither
discipline in the field, exercise to their arms, skill to attack, nor
temper to retreat. And therefore I must confess it seemed strange
to me, when I came home and heard our people say such fine things
of the power, riches, glory, magnificence, and trade of the Chinese ;
because I saw and knew that they were a contemptible herd, or
crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves, subjected to a government qualified
only to rule such a people. And in a word (for I am now launched
quite beside my design)—I say, in a word, were not its distance
inconceivably great from Muscovy, and were not the Muscovite
empire almost as rude, impotent, and ill-governed a crowd of slaves
as they, the Czar of Muscovy might with much ease drive them all
out of their country, and conquer them in one campaign. And
had the Czar, who I since hear is a growing prince, and begins to
appear formidable in the world, fallen this way, instead of attack-
ing the warlike Swedes (in which attempt none of the powers of
Kurope would have envied or interrupted him), he might by this
time have been Emperor of China, instead of being beaten by the
King of Sweden at Narva, when the latter was not one to six in
number. As their strength and their grandeur, so their naviga-
tion, commerce, and husbandry are imperfect and impotent, com-
pared to the same things in Hurope; also their knowledge, their
learning, their skill in the sciences. They have globes and spheres,
and a snatch of the knowledge of the mathematics; but when you
come to inquire into their knowledge, how short-sighted are the
wisest of their students! They know nothing of the motion of
the heavenly bodies; and so grossly and absurdly ignorant, that
when the sun is eclipsed, they think it is a great dragon has
assaulted and run away with it, and they fall a clattering with all
the drums and kettles in the country, to fright the monster away,
just as we do to hive a swarm of bees!

As this is the only excursion of this kind which I have made
in all the account I have given of my travels, so I shall make no
more descriptions of countries and people; it is none of my busi-
ness, or any part of my design, but giving an account of my own
adventures, through a life of inimitable wanderings, and a long
variety of changes, which perhaps few that come after me will have