Scientific knowledge advanced during the Qing, but there was not a change in the way this knowledge was organized or the way scientific evidence was defined or its truth tested. The powerful official Ruan Yuan at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for instance, supported a community of scientists and compiled the "Chouren zhuan" (畴人传; Biographies of mathematical scientists), a collection of biographies that eventually included nearly 700 Chinese and over 200 Western scientists. His attempt to reconcile Chinese and the Western science introduced by the Jesuits by arguing that both had originated in ancient China did not succeed, but he did show that science could be conceived and practiced separately from humanistic scholarship. Those who studied the physical universe shared their findings with each other and identified themselves as men of science, but they did not have a separate and independent professional role with its own training and advancement. They were still literati.