美国国会图书馆曾展出陈列了罗马梵蒂冈文物,其中有个部分记述了14世纪到17世纪近三百年的罗马人在中国的学术活动。陈列品里有些原始文献记录了西方人学习研究和使用中国《易经》的学术活动和他们的研究笔迹,其中有段记录说:
Adam Schall's assistant, Verbiest, labored in a strange mode not quite Euclidean and not quite Chinese, as he pondered questions of the Chinese I-ching and geometric form. Aside from being a fortune book, the I-ching was the mainstay of an ancient philosophy of number and symmetry. It deals much with the numbers three and six, as seen in Verbiest's hexagons and triangles. He has larded his pages with sayings from that classic, apparently in his own hand. This pull-out page is one of many working notes that were bound together with Verbiest's printed eclipse predictions and his apologia of western astronomy for the Manchu court.