for use on
seals. Under the Chou dynasty, however, as well as the two succeeding
it, the meaning of the word was not "seal," but "sinuous curves," as
made in writing. It has accordingly been suggested that this epoch
marks the first introduction into China of the brush in place of the
bamboo or wooden pencil with frayed end which was used with some kind
of colouring matter or varnish. There are many arguments both for and
against this view; but it is unquestionable, at any rate, that the
introduction of a supple implement like the brush at the very time
when the forms of characters were fast becoming crystallized and
fixed, would be sufficient to account for a great revolution in the
style of writing. Authentic specimens of the [Ch][Ch] _ta chuan_,
older or Greater Seal writing, are exceedingly rare. But it is
generally believed that the inscriptions on the famous stone drums,
now at Peking, date from the reign of King Hsuean, and they may
therefore with practical certainty be cited as examples of the Greater
Seal in its original form. These "drums" are really ten roughly
chiselled mountain boulders, which were discovered in the early part
of the 7th century, lying half buried in the ground near Feng-hsiang
Fu in the province of Shensi. On them are engraved ten odes, a
complete ode being cut on each drum, celebrating an Imperial hunting
and fishing expedition in that part of the country. A facsimile of one
of these, taken from an old rubbing and reproduced in Dr Bushell's
_Handbook of Chinese Art_, shows that great strides had been made in
this writing towards symmetry, compactness and conventionalism. The
vogue of the Greater Seal appears to have lasted until the reign of
the First Emperor, 221-210 B.C. (see _History_), when a further
modification took place. For many centuries China had been split up
into a number of practically independent states, and this circumstance
seems to have led to considerable variations in the styles of writing.
Having succeeded in unifying the empire, the First Emperor proceeded,
on the advice of his minister Li Ss[)u], to standardize its script by
ordaining that only the style in use in his own state of Ch'in should
henceforward be employed throughout China. It is clear, then, that
this new style of writing was nothing more than the Greater Seal
characters in the form they had assumed after several centuries of
evoluti