CHINESE METHOD OF FISHING.
There is nothing more extraordinary in the history of the different nations of the world than the ingenuity of the Chinese. They are the most handy people on the face of the earth, and the lower orders are just as clever as the higher. A proof of this may be seen at a fishing village which is contiguous to the town of Victoria, in Hong Kong. It remains in much the same state as that in which it existed prior to the British occupation of the island. Old worn-out boats, and torn mat-sails, bamboos and dried rushes,—these are the principal materials employed in the construction of their domiciles. The fishing boats are most ingeniously built. Each of these has a long projecting bamboo, which is rigged out from the stem in the form of a bowsprit, only working on a pivot. From the extremity of this outrigger, a strong rope communicates with a balance-board, that exactly poises the bamboo outrigger, when the net is immersed in water, and the fisherman has only to walk up and down this plank to raise the net and let it drop again in the water. But opposite to the island, and on many of the little insular rocks which constitute the "ten thousand isles," of which the emperor of China, amongst his vast pretensions to titles, lays claim to be lord, fishing is conducted on a larger scale, though worked upon the same principles. Huge poles are driven into the ground where the water is comparatively shallow, and leading ropes, which pass over a block-wheel inserted in the tops of these poles, communicate at one end with large circular nets, (constructed somewhat in the shape of a funnel, the upper rim being attached to floats, whilst from the centre are pendant weights,) the other end being fastened on shore to a balance plank, which the weight of one man suffices to work.
CHINESE METHOD OF FISHING.
MOSQUE OF OMAR.
The opposite engraving represents the Great Mosque at Jerusalem. It is built on the exact site of Solomon's Temple, and takes its name from its original founder, the Caliph Omar. It is a Turkish edifice, and is devoted to the worship of Mahomet.
Titus having taken Jerusalem in the second year of Vespasian's reign, not one stone was left upon another of that Temple where Christ had done such glorious things, and the destruction of which he had predicted. When the Caliph Omar took Jerusalem, in 636 A.D., it appears that the site of the Temple, with the exception of a very small part, had been abandoned by the Christians. Said-Eben-Batrick, an Arabian historian, relates that the Caliph applied to the Patriarch Sophronius, and enquired of him what would be the most proper place at Jerusalem for building a mosque. Sophronius conducted him to the ruins of Solomon's Temple. Omar, delighted with the opportunity of erecting a mosque on so celebrated a spot, caused the ground to be cleared, and the earth to be removed from a large rock, where God is said to have conversed with Jacob. From that rock the new mosque took its name of Gameat-el-Sakhra, and became almost as sacred an object to the Mussulmans, as the mosques of Mecca and Medina. The Caliph El-Oulid contributed still more to the embellishment of El-Sakhra, and covered it with a dome of copper, gilt, taken from a church at Balbeck. In the sequel, the crusaders converted the Temple of Mahomet into a sanctuary of Christ; but when Saladin re-took Jerusalem, he restored this edifice to its original use.
