One Tomson, a Jesuit, showed me such a collection of rarities, sent from the Jesuits of Japan and China to their Order at Paris, as a present to be reserved in their repository, but brought to London by the East India ships for them, as in my life I had not seen. The chief things were, rhinoceros's horns; glorious vests, wrought and embroidered on cloth of gold, but with such lively colors, that for splendor and vividness we have nothing in Europe that approaches it; a girdle studded with agates and rubies of great value and size; knives, of so keen an edge as one could not touch them, nor was the metal of our color, but more pale and livid; fans, like those our ladies use, but much larger, and with long handles curiously carved and filled with Chinese characters; a sort of paper very broad, thin, and fine, like abortive parchment, and exquisitely polished, of an amber yellow, exceedingly glorious and pretty to look on, and seeming to be like that which my[Pg 374] Lord Verulam describes in his "Nova Atlantis"; several other sorts of paper, some written, others printed; prints of landscapes, their idols, saints, pagods, of most ugly serpentine monstrous and hideous shapes, to which they paid devotion; pictures of men and countries, rarely painted on a sort of gummed calico, transparent as glass; flowers, trees, beasts, birds, etc., excellently wrought in a kind of sleeve silk, very natural; divers drugs that our druggists and physicians could make nothing of, especially one which the Jesuit called Lac Tigridis: it looked like a fungus, but was weighty like metal, yet was a concretion, or coagulation, of some other matter; several book MSS.; a grammar of the language written in Spanish; with innumerable other rarities.