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.