It seems to be quite certain that in very early times, when the possibility and advantage of committing thought to writing first suggested themselves to the Chinese mind, rude pictures of things formed the whole stock in trade.  Such were

[Illustration:  Sun, moon, mountains, hand, child, wood, bending official, mouth, ox, and claws.]

in many of which it is not difficult to trace the modern forms of to-day,

    [mi yue shan shiu zi mu chen kou niu zhao]

It may here be noted that there was a tendency to curves so long as the characters were scratched on bamboo tablets with a metal stylus.  With the invention of paper in the first century A.D., and the substitution of a hair-pencil for the stylus, verticals and horizontals came more into vogue.

The second step was the combination of two pictures to make a third; for instance, a mouth with something coming out of it is “the tongue,” [gua]; a mouth with something else coming out of it is “speech,” “words,” [yan]; two trees put side by side make the picture of a “forest,” [lin].

The next step was to produce pictures of ideas.  For instance, there already existed in speech a word ming, meaning “bright.”  To express this, the Chinese placed in juxtaposition the two brightest things known to them.  Thus [mi] the “sun” and [yue] the “moon” were combined to form [ming] ming “bright.”  There is as yet no suggestion of phonetic influence.  The combined character has a sound quite different from that of either of its component parts, which are jih and yueeh respectively.

In like manner, [mi] “sun” and [mu] “tree,” combined as [dong], “the sun seen rising through trees,” signified “the east”; [yan] “words” and [gua] “tongue” = [hua] “speech”; [you] (old form [Illustration]) “two hands” = “friendship”; [nue] “woman” and [zi] “child” = [hao] “good”; [nue] “woman” and [sheng] “birth,” “born of a woman” = [xing] “clan name,” showing that the ancient Chinese traced through the mother and not through the father; [wu] streamers used in signalling a negative = “do not!”

From [lin] “two trees,” the picture of a forest, we come to [sen] “three trees,” suggesting the idea of density of growth and darkness; [xiao] “a child at the feet of an old man” = “filial piety”; [ge] “a spear” and [shou] “to kill,” suggesting the defensive attitude of individuals in primeval times = [wo] “I, me”; [wo] “I, my,” and [yang] “sheep,” suggesting the obligation to respect another man’s flocks = [yi] “duty toward one’s neighbour”; [da] “large” and [yang] “sheep” = [mei] “beautiful”; and [shan], “virtuous,” also has “sheep” as a component part,—­why we do not very satisfactorily make out, except that of course the sheep would play an important role among early pastoral tribes.  The idea conveyed by what we call the conjunction “and” is expressed in Chinese by an ideogram, viz. [ji], which was originally the picture of a hand, seizing what might be the tail of the coat of a man preceding, scilicet following.