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 of tree; e.g. [song] sung “a fir tree,” [sang] sang “a mulberry tree”; and by extension it points toward anything of wood, as [ban] pan “a board,” [zhuo] cho “a table,” [yi] i “a chair,” and so on.

So [yu] yue “a fish” and [diao] niao “a bird” are found in all characters of ichthyological or ornithological types, respectively.

[ren] jen “a man” is found in a large number of characters dealing with humanity under varied aspects; e.g. [ni] ni “thou,” [ta] t’a “he,” [zuo] tso “to make,” [zhang] chang “a weapon,” [jie] chieh “a hero,” [ru] ju “a scholar,” “a Confucianist”; while it has been pointed out that such words as [jian] chien “treacherous,” [mei] mei “to flatter,” and [du] tu “jealousy,” are all written with the indicator [nu] nue “woman” at the side.

The question now arises how these significant parts got into their present position.  Have they always been there, and was the script artificially constructed off-hand, as is the case with Mongolian and Manchu?  The answer to this question can hardly be presented in a few words, but involves the following considerations.