After having mastered Latin, he went on to make such good progress in Chinese that, in 1846,
James Legge engaged him to superintend the
London Missionary Society's press in Shanghai. In this position, he acquired a wide knowledge of Chinese religion and civilisation, and especially of mathematics, enabling him to demonstrate in his paper
Jottings on the Science of the Chinese that
Sir George Horner's
method (1819) of solving equations of all orders had been known to the Chinese mathematicians of the 14th century. He made several journeys into the interior, notably in 1858 with
Lord Elgin on a British Navy gunboat up the
Yangtze and to Nanjing, where he served as one member of a delegation of three to meet with officials of the
Taiping, and in 1868 with
Griffith John to the capital of
Sichuan and the source of the
Han. He completed the distribution of one million Chinese New Testaments provided by the
British and Foreign Bible Society's special fund of 1855. From 1863 he was an agent of the
British and Foreign Bible Society. He was succeeded by Samuel Dyer, Junior, the son of
Samuel Dyer and brother-in-law of
Hudson Taylor. In Chinese, he translated books on
arithmetic,
calculus (
Loomis),
algebra (
De Morgan's),
mechanics,
astronomy (
Herschel's), in collaboration with
Li Shanlan, and
The Marine Steam Engine (TJ Main and T Brown), as well as translations of the
Gospel According to Matthew and the
Gospel According to Mark. In English his chief works were
Jottings on the Science of the Chinese, published in 1853, Shanghai; a collection of articles published under the title
Chinese Researches by Alexander Wylie (Shanghai, 1897);
Memorials of Protestant Missionaries (1867);
Notes on Chinese Literature (Shanghai, 1867). He also published an article on the
Nestorian Tablet in
Xi'an. ==Retirement==