PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
The issue of a second edition of this volume has afforded the writer an opportunity of making certain alterations which it is hoped will add to the utility of the work and secure continuity between this and the second volume of the Course which was issued in 1909. The last 180 characters in the List under Section XII. of the first edition have been struck out and others substituted for them. These are embodied in three stories contained in Section XI. of the present volume, in which exactly one thousand characters are now made use of.
In deference to a suggestion made by various critics, the Chinese text has now been placed in one section near the end of the volume, and the index of characters under their radicals has been changed by the substitution of reference numbers for the meanings given in the first edition.
Reference has been made towards the close of the first edition to a vocabulary which it was intended to embody in Volume II. After this vocabulary had been practically completed the writer came to the conclusion that the needs of the student would be more adequately met by the compilation of a comprehensive dictionary of Northern colloquial Chinese. The vocabulary was accordingly discarded, and
