About one hundred years B.C., a new kind of mirror comes into vogue, called by an entirely new name, not before used.  In common with the word previously employed, its indicator is “metal,” showing under which kingdom it falls,—­i.e. a mirror of metal.  These new mirrors were small disks of melted metal, highly polished on one side and profusely decorated with carvings on the other,—­a description which exactly tallies with that of the ancient Greek mirror.  Specimens survived to comparatively recent times, and it is even alleged that many of these old mirrors are in existence still.  A large number of illustrations of them are given in the great encyclopaedia of the eighteenth century, and the fifth of these, in chronological order, second century B.C., is remarkable as being ornamented with the well-known “key,” or Greek pattern, so common in Chinese decoration.

Another is covered with birds flying about among branches of pomegranate laden with fruit cut in halves to show the seeds.

Shortly afterward we come to a mirror so lavishly decorated with bunches of grapes and vine-leaves that the eye is arrested at once.  Interspersed with these are several animals, among others the lion, which is unknown in China.  The Chinese word for “lion,” as I stated in my first lecture, is shih, an imitation of the Persian shir.  There is also a lion’s head with a bar in its mouth, recalling the door-handles to temples in ancient Greece.  Besides the snake, the tortoise, and the sea-otter, there is what is far more remarkable than any of these, namely, a horse with wings.

On comparing the latter with Pegasus as he appears in sculpture, it is quite impossible to doubt that the Chinese is a copy of the Greek animal.  The former is said to have come down from heaven, and was caught, according to tradition, on the banks of a river in B.C. 120.

The name for pomegranate in China is “the Parthian fruit,” showing that it was introduced from Parthia, the Chinese equivalent for Parthia being [an][xi] Ansik, which is an easy corruption of the Greek Arsakes, the first king of Parthia.

The term for grape is admittedly of foreign origin, like the fruit itself.  It is [pu][tao] pu t’ou.  Here it is easy to recognise the Greek word Botrus, a cluster, or bunch, of grapes.

Similarly, the Chinese word for “radish,” [luo][bo] lo po, also of foreign origin, is no doubt a corruption of raphe, it being of course well known that the Chinese cannot pronounce an initial r.

There is one term, especially, in Chinese which at once carries conviction as to its Greek origin.  This is the term for watermelon.  The two Chinese characters chosen to represent the sound mean “Western gourd,” i.e. the gourd which came from the West.  Some Chinese say, on no authority in particular, that it was introduced by the Kitan Tartars; others say that it was introduced by the first Emperor of the so-called Golden Tartars.  But the Chinese term is still pronounced si kua, which is absolutely identical with the Greek word sikua, of which Liddell and Scott say, “perhaps the melon.”  For these three words it would now scarcely be rash to substitute “the watermelon.”