Excerpt from The Middle Kingdom, Vol. 2 of 2: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, &C. Of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants IT is a sensible remark of De Guignes p. That the habit we fall into of conceiving things according to the words which express them, often leads us into error when read ing the relations of travellers. Such writers have seen objects altogether new, but they are compelled, when describing them, to employ equivalent terms in their own language in order to be understood while these same terms tend to deceive the reader, who imagines that he sees such palaces, colonnades, peristyles, &c., under these designations as he has been used to, when, in fact, they are quite another thing. The same observation is true of other things than architecture, and of other nations than the Chinese, and this confusion of terms and meanings proves a fruitful source of error in regard to an accurate knowledge of foreign nations, and a just perception of their condition. For instance, the terms a court of justice, a common school, politeness, learning, navy, houses, Geo. As well as the names of things, like razor, shoe, cap, bed, pencil, paper, &c., are inapplicable to the same things in England and China; while it is plainly impossible to coin a new word in English to describe the Chinese article. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.