ce for
gaining an insight into the social, political, and religious history
of that country from the beginning of our era to the time of the
Mohammedan conquest. The importance of Mohammedan writers, so far as
they treat on the history of India during the Middle Ages, was soon
recognised, and in a memoir lately published by the most eminent
Arabic scholar of France, M. Reinaud, new and valuable historical
materials have been collected--materials doubly valuable in India,
where no native historian has ever noted down the passing events of
the day. But, although the existence of similar documents in Chinese
was known, and although men of the highest literary eminence--such as
Humboldt, Biot, and others--had repeatedly urged the necessity of
having a translation of the early travels of the Chinese Pilgrims, it
seemed almost as if our curiosity was never to be satisfied. France
has been the only country where Chinese scholarship has ever
flourished, and it was a French scholar, Abel Remusat, who undertook
at last the translation of one of the Chinese Pilgrims. Remusat died
before his work was published, and his translation of the travels of
Fahian, edited by M. Landresse, remained for a long time without being
followed up by any other. Nor did the work of that eminent scholar
answer all expectations. Most of the proper names, the names of
countries, towns, mountains, and rivers, the titles of books, and the
whole Buddhistic phraseology, were so disguised in their Chinese dress
that it was frequently impossible to discover their original form.

The Chinese alphabet was never intended to represent the sound of
words. It was in its origin a hieroglyphic system, each word having
its own graphic representative. Nor would it have been possible to
write Chinese in any other way. Chinese is a monosyllabic language. No
word is allowed more than one consonant and one vowel,--the vowels
including diphthongs and nasal vowels. Hence the possible number of
words is extremely small, and the number of significative sounds in
the Chinese language is said to be no more than 450. No language,
however, could be satisfied with so small a vocabulary, and in
Chinese, as in other monosyllabic dialects, each word, as it was
pronounced with various accents and intonations, was made to convey a
large number of meanings; so that the total number of words, or rather
of ideas, expressed in Chinese, is said to amount to 43,496. Hence a
graphic represent