e had already been for some centuries
ripe for such a production, and accordingly Hsue Shen set to work to fill
the void. He collected 9353 written characters,--presumably all that
were in existence at the time,--to which he added 1163 duplicates,
_i.e._ various forms of writing the same character, and then arranged
them in groups under those parts which, as we have already seen in the
preceding Lecture, are indicators of the direction in which the sense of
a character is to be looked for. Thus, all characters containing the
element [CJK:72AD] "dog" were brought together; all those containing
[CJK:8279] "vegetation," [chuang] "disease," etc.

So far as we know, this system originated with him; and we are therefore
not surprised to find that in his hands it was on a clumsier scale than
that in vogue to-day. Hsue Shen uses no fewer than 540 of these
indicators, and even when the indicator to a character is satisfactorily
ascertained, it still remains to search through all the characters under
that particular group. Printing from movable types would have been
impossible under such a system.

In the modern standard dictionary, published in 1716, under the
direction of the Emperor K'ang Hsi, there are only 214 indicators
employed, and there is a further sub-arrangement of these groups
according to the number of strokes in the other, the phonetic portion of
the character. Thus, the indicators "hand," "wood," "fire," "water," or
whatever it may be, settle the group in which a given character will be
found, and the number of strokes in the remaining portion will refer it
to a comparatively small sub-group, from which it can be readily picked
out. For instance, [song] "a fir tree" will be found under the indicator
[mu] "tree," sub-group No. 4, because the remaining portion [gong]
consists of four strokes in writing.

Good copies of this dictionary are not too easily obtained nowadays. The
"Palace" edition, as it is called, is on beautifully white paper, and is
a splendid specimen of typography.

A most wonderful literary feat was achieved under the direction of
the before-mentioned Emperor K'ang Hsi, when a general Concordance
to the phraseology of all literature was compiled and published for
general use. Word-concordances to the Bible and to Shakespeare are
generally looked upon as no small undertakings, but what about
a phrase-concordance to all literature? Well, in 1711 this was
successfully carried out, and remains to-