with sounds. Many persons, otherwise gifted, are quite unable
to learn any foreign tongue.

Let us now turn to the machinery by means of which the Chinese arrest
the winged words of speech, and give to mere thought and utterance a
more concrete and a more lasting form.

The written language has one advantage over the colloquial: it is
uniformly the same all over China; and the same document is equally
intelligible to natives of Peking and Canton, just as the Arabic and
Roman numerals are understood all over Europe, although pronounced
differently by various nations.

To this fact some have attributed the stability of the Chinese Empire
and the permanence of her political and social institutions.

If we take the written language of to-day, which is to all intents and
purposes the written language of twenty-five hundred years ago, we gaze
at first on what seems to be a confused mass of separate signs, each
sign being apparently a fortuitous concourse of dots and dashes.
Gradually, however, the eye comes to perceive that every now and again
there is to be found in one character a certain portion which has
already been observed in another, and this may well have given rise to
the idea that each character is built up of parts equivalent to our
letters of the alphabet. These portions are of two kinds, and must be
considered under two separate heads.

Under the first head come a variety of words, which also occur as
substantive characters, such as dog, vegetation, tree, disease, metal,
words, fish, bird, man, woman. These are found to indicate the direction
in which the sense of the whole character is to be sought.

Thus, whenever [CJK:72AD] "dog" occurs in a character, the reader may
prepare for the name of some animal, as for instance [shi] _shih_
"lion," [mao] _mao_ "cat," [lang] _lang_ "wolf", [zhu] _ehu_ "pig."

Two of these are interesting words. (1) There are no lions in China;
_shih_ is merely an imitation of the Persian word _shir_. (2) _Mao_, the
term for a "cat," is obviously an example of onomatopoeia.

The character [CJK:72AD] will also indicate in many cases such
attributes as [hua] _hua_ "tricky," [heng] _hen_, "aggressive," [meng]
_meng_ "fierce," and other characteristics of animals.

Similarly, [CJK:8279] _ts'ao_ "vegetation" will hint at some plant;
_e.g._ [tsao] _ts'ao_ "grass," [he] _ho_ "the lily," [zhi] _chih_ "the
plant of immortality."

[mu] _mu_ "a tree" usually points toward some species