It must be pointed out that Huainan Wanbi Shu is by no means a scientific work in the strict sense. It contains the observations and experiments of the ancients, and also adopts their imagination and reasoning. Moreover, Huainan School did not distinguish the two clearly when writing this book, and often turned imagination into reality, which brought confusion. In the previous entries, we have glimpsed this style of Huainan Wanbi Book.
What's more, Huainan Wanbi Shu pushed this imagination into many aspects of social life, which led to the appearance of things that made modern people look absurd. For example, it says, "Spiders draw their feet, not bridges." This means that after the spider is killed, it can wade with its juice. He also said, "a magnet hangs a well, and the dead go home"; "Bury four stones, there is no ghost at home"; "Crab and lacquer combine to become immortal"; "Teng snakes get pregnant when they listen, and egrets get pregnant when they look", and so on. This kind of thing accounts for a large proportion in ten thousand books in Huainan.
The fallacy in Huainan Wanbi Shu has long been discovered. According to the biography of Liu Hanxiang, "There are ministers in the pillow, Hongbao and Garden in Huainan, saying that God makes the ghost gold and Zou Yan prolongs his life, which is unknown to the world." "Pillow" means "Huainan Pillow"; "Hongbao" has already been mentioned, and it is a novella of "King of Huainan"; "Garden secret", that is, "ten thousand strokes", is tone sandhi. These three books are rare in the world. Liu Xiang's father "ruled Huainan prison and got his book", and Liu Xiang "read it when he was young and thought it was strange". Later, he dedicated it to the emperor as a step forward. The emperor "ordered the casting of the canon and spent a lot of money to test it." The "non-inspection" here includes not only the art of making gold artificially, but also the relevant records in Huainan Wanbi Shu. Liu Xiang almost lost his mind about it. It can be seen that the illusory elements in such books have been tested at that time. When we use this book today, we also need a scientific attitude. Through full analysis and screening, we can explore its scientific content and abandon its absurd components, so as to truly play its historical role.