1697 年 12 月 2 日，萊布尼茨寫給白晉的信

Since there will be work done in France to translate a good number of Chinese books, I beseech Your Reverence to inform me further by what means this will be done, whether there are enough Europeans capable of undertaking it, or whether some Chinese were brought for this task.

由于在法國將有翻譯大量中文書籍的工作，我懇請閣下進(jìn)一步告知我將通過什么方式進(jìn)行這項工作，是否有足夠的歐洲人能夠勝任這項工作，或者是否帶來了一些中國人協(xié)助完成這個任務(wù)。

16 98 年 2 月 2 8 日，白晉 寫給 萊布尼茨的信

The most important point to which we mean to apply ourselves is their chronology, which we will try to establish with all the thoroughness and precision possible. For this effect we intend to make a solid critique of the principal authors who wrote their histories and their chronicles, as according to your plan. After this we will work on their natural and civil history, on their physics, their ethics,their laws, their politics, their arts, their mathematics, and their medicine, which is one of the subjects on which I am convinced that China can furnish us with some of the best information. I speak of it this way because I am more attached to it than to any other. I even already have many notes on the above that I am taking back with me since I have not had the leisure to systematize them as I wished. I only left in the hands of Abbot Bignon the translation of a small treatise on the pulse which is in the front of the Chinese herbal which I put in the king's library.Father le Gobien has the rough copy of this translation along with the translation of the preface to this herbal, in which one can see all the design and economy of this work which is a complete corpus of the?natural?history of China.

我們打算應(yīng)用的最重要的一點(diǎn)是他們的年表，我們將盡可能徹底和準(zhǔn)確地建立這個年表。為了達(dá)到這個目的，我們打算按照你的計劃，對撰寫他們的歷史和編年史的主要作者進(jìn)行嚴(yán)格的批評。在這之后，我們將研究他們的自然史和民俗史，研究他們的物理學(xué)、倫理學(xué)、法律、政治、藝術(shù)、數(shù)學(xué)和醫(yī)學(xué)，這是我確信中國可以為我們提供一些最佳信息的主題之一。我之所以這樣說，是因為我對它的感情比對其他任何東西都要深。我甚至已經(jīng)有了許多關(guān)于上述問題的筆記，我要把它們帶回去，因為我沒有閑情逸致按自己的意愿把它們系統(tǒng)化。我只把我放在國王圖書館的中草藥（指《本草綱目》？）前面的一篇關(guān)于脈搏的小論文的譯文留在了比農(nóng)院長的手中。戈比恩神父有這篇譯文的粗略副本，還有這篇中草藥的序言的譯文，從這篇序言中可以看出這部作品的所有設(shè)計和經(jīng)濟(jì)性，它是中國自然史的一個完整語料庫。

16 99 年 9月19日，白晉 寫給 萊布尼茨的信

As to our intended designs in working for the conversion of the Chinese, of drawing from this nation all that can serve toward the perfection of our sciences and our arts in order to communicate it to our scholars, in as much as we had already formed for ourselves nearly the same plan that you have proposed.

至于我們?yōu)橹袊说酿б蓝Φ挠媱?，以及從這個國家汲取一切可以幫助我們完善我們的科學(xué)和藝術(shù)的東西，以便將它傳達(dá)給我們的學(xué)者的計劃，與您提出的計劃幾乎不謀而合。