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languages in a quarter of the time. There is now, I repeat it, little difficulty or uncertainty in the interpretation of the most ancient Chinese docu- ments. How a language without inflexions can be understood so readily, may appear strange; but Chinese has its own laws; and as Julien, in the latest work which came from his
pen, observes:- 'It answers well enough to all the requirements of thought to have allowed Chinese writers, for more than twenty centuries, and in innumerable Works, to treat all the subjects, scientific or literary, that exercise the human spirit.' Indeed the meaning of the writer in good Chinese composition strikes the mind as forcibly as the most eloquent sentences of an alphabetic language,-being a thing seen weightier than a thing heard. Nor is the spoken language an inadequate vehicle of discourse. I have seen the statement, that it is impossible to conceive of a Chinese Parliament or Debating Society; but I have listened to triumphs of oratory in China as great as ever I have known in this country.
We have obtained then the mastery of Chinese so far that we can enter into the possession of whatever has been written and printed in it, and can use it both to speak and write our thoughts. We understand the working of the machine, and can make use of it for our own purposes; it remains for us to take it to pieces, and see the principles on which it was built. The relation between the picture image and the external object which it represents is sufficiently clear; but the formation and meaning of the pho- netic symbols have not been sufficiently investigated. By studying the two classes of characters we can get a tolerably distinct picture of what was the social
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state of the Chinese tribe more than four thousand years ago, cultivating the ground, acquainted with the plough, the waggon, and the war chariot; skilled in the art of pottery, and in weaving fabrics of silk and linen, and holding the same principles of re- ligious duty which the nation acknowledges to-day. Dr. Edkins has also suggested in his latest work, published a few months ago, 'An Introduction to the study of the Chinese characters; that such linguistic researches may throw light on the origin of words. The intellectual task,' he says, 'of forming the characters was in several respects a renewal of the original task of forming words them- selves. It is very important that attention should be drawn to the conditions of those times anterior to linguistic history, when language was a true idealism; every word the clear and expressive sign of some natural sound, and the human sensations, in the hour of their juvenile freshness and truthful sharpness, were assisted in the formation of lan- guage by an intellectual faculty which only acted in accordance with the unartificial laws of nature.' This analysis of the phonetic symbols of China would certainly seem to take us very near to the fountain- head of human speech; of the speech at least of that which is now very much the largest of all the human families. The analysis, however, will demand equally caution, ingenuity, and persistence.
And in this way it may be possible to carry the results of our investigations into the field of com- parative philology. That Chinese can ever play the part in this which Sanskrit has done is impossible. The unique character of the language must be kept in mind, In drawing comparisons between it and
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