and combination of the sounds they represented, by which alone the vocabulary could have been enlarged. To devise a new picture was a simple matter; but the art of forming new monosyllables was a lost one. Therefore, with the exception of a certain amount of the fusion above mentioned, he takes merely the old stock of words to express the new conceptions. The word chi is employed for 212 signs, ching for 113, and fou for 138. This defect of syllables is wonderfully compensated, as we shall hereafter see, by the extended uses of a written language of endless resource.
The Written Signs.
Before indicating these uses, I proceed to trace, as far as I may, the universal laws and processes to which Chinese graphic system invites our attention.
Origin of art of writing; early stages of imitation. The ideograph.
The wonderful art of communicating thought by written signs has three stages,—the ideograph, the rebus, the alphabet. This process is a pressure of materials from below, through attractions to an ideal above. It begins in the instinctive use of the nearest means for bringing thoughts to the eye. The savage not only cuts figures on bark to inform his tribe of his doings; he tattoos himself with images of his totems, from the mere love of reproducing that for other eyes of which his own mind is full. On the Siberian rocks are found rudely-cut pictures of men, animals, arrows, huts, with other sprawling signs, some of which appear like a looped and cursive writing, though of no known class, while others, equally unrelated, are curiously enough mixed with Arabic numerals and Roman letters.[1] This last fact renders their antiquity very suspicious. More significant are the rude pictures of expeditions or exploits painted on buffalo robes by the North American tribes, which are real
- ↑ See De Rosny, Archives Palæographiques, I. 143.
