China is the type of permanence in the world.  To say that it is older than any other existing nation is saying very little.  Herodotus, who has been called the Father of History, travelled in Egypt about 450 B.C.  He studied its monuments, bearing the names of kings who were as distant from his time as he is from ours,—­monuments which even then belonged to a gray antiquity.  But the kings who erected those monuments were possibly posterior to the founders of the Chinese Empire.  Porcelain vessels, with Chinese mottoes on them, have been found in those ancient tombs, in shape, material, and appearance precisely like those which are made in China to-day; and Rosellini believes them to have been imported from China by kings contemporary with Moses, or before him.  This nation and its institutions have outlasted everything.  The ancient Bactrian and Assyrian kingdoms, the Persian monarchy, Greece and Rome, have all risen, flourished, and fallen,—­and China continues still the same.  The dynasty has been occasionally changed; but the laws, customs, institutions, all that makes national life, have continued.  The authentic history of China commences some two thousand years before Christ, and a thousand years in this history is like a century in that of any other people.  The oral language of China has continued the same that it is now for thirty centuries.  The great wall bounding the empire on the north, which is twelve hundred and forty miles long and twenty feet high, with towers every few hundred yards,—­which crosses mountain ridges, descends into valleys, and is carried over rivers on arches,—­was built two hundred years before Christ, probably to repel those fierce tribes who, after ineffectual attempts to conquer China, travelled westward till they appeared on the borders of Europe five hundred years later, and, under the name of Huns, assisted in the downfall of the Roman Empire.  All China was intersected with canals at a period when none existed in Europe.  The great canal, like the great wall, is unrivalled by any similar existing work.  It is twice the length of the Erie Canal, is from two hundred to a thousand feet wide, and has enormous banks built of solid granite along a great part of its course.  One of the important mechanical inventions of modern Europe is the Artesian well.  That sunk at Grenelle, in France, was long supposed to be the deepest in the world, going down eighteen hundred feet.  One at St. Louis, in the United States, has since been drilled to a depth, as has recently been stated, of about four thousand.[9] But in China these wells are found by tens of thousands, sunk at very remote periods to obtain salt water.  The method used by the Chinese from immemorial time has recently been adopted instead of our own as being the most simple and economical.  The Chinese have been long acquainted with the circulation of the blood; they inoculated for the small-pox in the ninth century; and about the same time they invented