Essential McLuhan 124 sitting up guarding their gardens against the depredations of wild pigs. For weeks on end they sleep only two or three hours a night. The important moral inference from all this is that the African of the old generation with whom we have nearly all worked, will never be seen again. The new generation is completely different, capable of rising to greater heights and of descending to greater depths. They deserve a more sympathetic knowledge of their difficulties and their far greater temptations. African parents need to be taught this before it is too late so that they may realize that they are dealing with finer bits of mechanism than they themselves were. Carothers stresses the fact that it is indeed a very little literacy that produces these effects, “some familiarity with written symbols—in reading, writing and arithmetic.” Finally (p. 318), Carothers turns for a moment to China, where printing had been invented in the seventh or eighth century and yet “seems to have had little effect in emancipating thought.” He calls in the testimony of Kenneth Scott Latourette, who writes in The Chinese, Their History and Culture (p. 310): The hypothetical visitor from Mars might well have expected the Industrial Revolution and the modern scientific approach to have made their first appearance in China rather than the Occident. The Chinese are so industrious, and have shown such ingenuity in invention and by empirical processes have forestalled the West in arriving at so much useful agricultural and medical lore that they, rather than the nations of the West, might have been looked to as the forerunners and leaders in what is termed the scientific approach towards the understanding and mystery of man’s natural environment. It is little short of amazing that a people who pioneered in the invention of paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass—to speak only of some of their best known innovations—did not also take precedence in devising the power loom, the steam engine, and the other revolutionary machines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The purpose of printing among the Chinese was not the creation of uniform repeatable products for a market and a price system. Print was an alternative to their prayer-wheels and was a visual means of multiplying incantatory spells, much like advertising in our age.