Five Thousand Years of John Chinaman Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FIVE THOUSAND YEARS JOHN CHINAMAN. It is a bold task to attempt to try and give within an hour's space, an account of 5,000 or more years of a people's history. It is, of course, impossible to do justice to such an immense subject in such a limited time. What I propose is to use a thin, attenuated thread of history to guide one's course down the ages and to strike off now and then on one subject, which amongst numbers of others may appear of interest. Long gaps must be left?some dynasties will be passed over unnoticed and thousands upon thousands of interesting episodes and events frought with lasting benefit or woe to the nation and its people completely ignored. I trust, however, that there will be enough left to give some idea of the history of the race and of the numerous problems to be studied and facts to be unearthed during the 5,000 years of their life. I have then simply taken 5,000 years as the time to pass under our review in a cursory survey to-night, though the Chinese carry their records back far beyond that. We perhaps laugh at such a remote antiquity; but our scientific men are constantly pushing back the probable geological period when the human race came on to the scene and adding to the possible seon-long age of what is otherwise, as regards the individual, a short-lived life. So though we cannot accept the so-called facts of the Chinese legend writer as veritable occurrences when narrated by him concerning these remote periods, the number of years of which these ages are composed are not so absurd as at first sight might appear to be the case. Take, for example the recent discoveries regarding ancient Babylon and Egyptand their extinct civilisations. One savant has recently stated that they may date back 30,000 years ' and that agriculture by migrator...Read More