Lexicography, which has since been so widely culti- vated by the Chinese, was called into being by a famous scholar named Hsu SHEN (d. A.D. 120). Entering upon an official career, he soon retired and devoted the rest of his life to books. He was a deep student of the Five Classics, and wrote a work on the discrepancies in the various criticisms of these books. But it is by his Shuo Wen that he is now known. This was a collection, with short explanatory notes, of all the characters about ten thousand which were to be found in Chinese literature as then existing, written in what is now known as the Lesser Seal style. It is the oldest Chinese dictionary of which we have any record, and has hitherto formed the basis of all etymological research. It is arranged under 540 radicals or classifiers, that is to say, specially selected portions of characters which indicate to some extent the direction in which lies the sense of the whole character, and its chief object was to exhibit the pictorial features of Chinese writing.
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