is bound up in sixteen hundred and twenty-eight handy
volumes of about two hundred pages each. A copy of the original
edition stands on the shelves of the British Museum, and a translation
of the Index has recently been completed.

_Manuscripts and Printing._--At the conclusion of this brief survey of
Chinese literature it may well be asked how such an enormous and
ever-increasing mass has been handed down from generation to generation.
According to the views put forth by early Chinese antiquarians, the
first written records were engraved with a special knife upon bamboo
slips and wooden tablets. The impracticability of such a process, as
applied to books, never seems to have dawned upon those writers; and
this snowball of error, started in the 7th century, long after the knife
and the tablet had disappeared as implements of writing, continued to
gather strength as time went on. Recent researches, however, have placed
it beyond doubt that when the Chinese began to write in a literary
sense, as opposed to mere scratchings on bones, they traced their
characters on slips of bamboo and tablets of wood with a bamboo pencil,
frayed at one end to carry the coloured liquid which stood in the place
of ink. The knife was used only to erase. So things went on until about
200 B.C., when it would appear that a brush of hair was substituted for
the bamboo pencil; after which, silk was called into requisition as an
appropriate vehicle in connexion with the more delicate brush. But silk
was expensive and difficult to handle, so that the invention of paper in
A.D. 105 by a eunuch, named Ts'ai Lun, came as a great boon, although it
seems clear that a certain kind of paper, made from silk floss, was in
use before his date. However that may be, from the 1st century onwards
the Chinese have been in possession of the same writing materials that
are in use at the present day.

In A.D. 170, Ts'ai Yung, who rose subsequently to the highest offices of
state, wrote out on stone in red ink the authorized text of the Five
Classics, to be engraved by workmen, and thus handed down to posterity.
The work covered forty-six huge tablets, of which a few fragments are
said to be still in existence. A similar undertaking was carried out in
837, and the later tablets are still standing at a temple in the city of
Hsi-an Fu, Shensi. With the T'ang dynasty, rubbings of famous
inscriptions, wherein the germ of printing may be detected, whether for
the s