'The trustees of the British Museum have got hold of
a great curiosity in the shape of a Chinese bank-note printed in the middle of the fourteenth century, several years before the establishment of the first European bank (said to be the bank established at Barcelona in 1401), and three centuries before the establishment of the Bank of Stockholm in 1668. The Chinese had bank-notes at a much earlier date, for Marco Polo saw some of them, printed on the inner bark of trees, before the end of the thirteenth century. It is remarkable that the Chinese had invented all the four principal modern instruments,—the compass, printing, gunpowder, and paper currency,—long before Europe had any of them, and yet that they remained almost useless tools in the hands of that acute but barren- minded people. Even their artillery, which they used centuries before Europe knew anything of artillery, appears to have been of hardly any real value to them. They never seem to have -put out their ideas to interest, but kept them wrapped up in napkins till they forgot their existence.
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