other cloth, it is called shu, a word which implies in its symbolism the idea of painting as distinguished from graving. Thus #shu "write," "book," is in the upper part the same as pit "hair pencil," "writing brush," in its lower part.

The word pit for pencil occurs commonly in literature from the T'sin dynasty, B.C. 200 onwards. The pencil then introduced by Meng kwa, builder of the Great Wall, was made of deer's hair in the middle and goat's hair on the outside. The tube that contained it was red, and vermilion was the colour of the paint made use of in all documents in the office of the historiographers.

Before that time the usage may be judged of by passages such as that in the Shï yi ki of the Han dynasty, "In times when there was no teacher who might give constant instruction, pupils did not fear long and mountainous paths which they trudged bravely with book tablets on their backs. Their pens were made by cutting willow twigs, and the sap of trees was used by them as ink." There seems to be an allusion here to the Chinese black varnish, which exudes from a tree and was anciently much used in writing.

In another passage tau "knife," and pi "brush," are spoken of as the commonly used ancient implements of writing. The knife would be used in cutting on bamboo tablets or on stone, while the brush would be the implement in ordinary use. The proper meaning of the word shu, when used classically as a verb, seems to be "brush." This is the sense when, in the Li ki, the six accomplishments of an ancient education embrace writing as the fifth among them. The others are li ceremonies, music, archery, riding and driving, and arithmetic.

The Buddhist cyclopædia Fa yuen chu lin, by a Chinese author of the Sung dynasty, says three men invented writing. The first was Brahma. He taught to write from left to right (Sanscrit). The second was Shu ku lu,1 who taught a method of writing from right to left (Semitic). The third and most recent of these three inventors was T'sang kie, the maker of the Chinese characters, who originated the method of writing from top to bottom.

The extant examples of the most ancient writing are known as the

1 See Kh under with R. man. The same character here used to write the syllable k'u is employed in expressing the second syllable of the name Bokhara. Hence Shu ku lu may be Shakra, i.e. Indra, as suggested to me by Prof. Max Müller.

Ku wen, and are found in old monuments and in the dictionary Shwo wen.

They are rude pictures of objects and suggestive groups of two or three pictures. A large number of the pictures when formed were borrowed for words that could not be represented by pictures. Thus one picture came to be the written sign of two or more things, the same in sound but different in sense.

Thus chodok "a spoon" takes as another meaning tik "to catch fish." Afterwards the radical kin "metal" was added on the left to indicate a special sense, suggested by the material of which fishhooks are made. In such a combination we call spoon the phonetic and metal the radical.

In the Ku wen pictures and suggestive groups were more common and phonetic combinations fewer than afterwards.

The number of characters that had radicals added to them in the Ta chwen, Siau chwen and Li shu is very great.

There is no record of any change in the character from the times of T'sang kie to B.C. 800. But many different forms described as Ku wen are found for the same character.

In the old vases, which reach back some of them to about B.C. 1500, the pictorial form of characters, as it was originally, may still be traced to some extent. The more ancient the form, the more true would it be to the original. It is rather in the modern shape of the characters that difficulty is found; for after they had passed from the Ku wen to the Lieu wen, from that to the Siau chwen and the Li, and so to the modern shape, it must not be expected that the primary form will be in all cases easy of detection.

There are some other forms of writing known as k'o teu, yü chu, etc., which are fanciful. The k'o teu is a very ancient style, older than the ta chwen, and like tadpoles. Hence the name The pa fen intervened between the Siau chwen and the Li shu. The Hing shu or rapid running hand is of recent origin. The discussion of all these may be omitted here, except the chwen, li, t'sau, and kiai.

The large chwen was the form introduced by Lieu, the historiographer of Cheu siuen wang, B.C. 800, whose name was applied to the new style. It looks as if it were properly a stone cut character, or a character made with a thick pointed brush. It is the shape used on

the Stone Drums, the legends of which have been recently translated,1 and belong to the same period and emperor.

This style is called either Ta chwen or Lieu wen. Yet there is a difference. When Li sï, B.C. 200, made the Siau chwen, that which was before known as Lieu wen received often the designation Ta chwen, to distinguish it from the new. There is more elaborateness in the Lieu wen than in the Ku wen. A fondness for ornamental flourishes crept in. The increased number of strokes thus brought into use rendered writing more laborious, and led to the reform which gave origin to the Siau chwen.

In the collection Kin shï tsui pien, published at the close of last century, the text of a large number of old monuments is given in chronological order.

At the beginning the Stone Drums occur. Then follows the inscription of Yü, known as Keu leu pei, attributed, but on insufficient grounds, to Yü, B.c. 1900. It is followed by the basin of Pi kan, who was minister of state B.C. 1123, and another of the San family. Both of these basins are assigned to the Shang dynasty, and are authorities for the Ku wen.

Of the Cheu period are given Tsiau shan ting, the tripod of Tsiau shan, in the province Kiang su. Then comes an inscription of four characters on the T'an mountain, at the town called Tsan hwang, and of the period в.c. 1000. In objecting to the genuineness of this inscription, native critics remark that the form of the four characters is more like the Siau chwen than either the Ku wen or the K'o teu, the styles then prevalent.

The other inscriptions belonging to the Cheu dynasty are Kau k'e tsun ming, of about в.c. 600, and containing about fifty characters, Mau tuy ming of forty-nine characters, Chung keu tui ming of thirty-two characters, and a brick with a single character on it. Tsun was a vessel for holding wine, and tui for holding millet.

There are three of the T'sin dynasty, and about eighty of the Han. The Yin and early Cheu inscriptions represent the Ku wen. From 800 B.c. to the end of the Cheu the inscriptions belong to the Ta chwen. They constitute the first great change, so far as we know, after the characters left the hands of T'sang kie and Tsü sung. The word chwen refers to the appearance of slips of bamboo

1 By S. W. Bushell, M.D.

written upon and tied round with tangled strings of silk. The writing looked like the strings in regard to their presenting rounded and confused shapes, and hence the name chwen.

Li sï, minister of T'sin shï hwang, was a great initiator of changes. His part in the introduction of the Siau chwen was the composition of the treatise called T'sang kie p'ien. He was assisted by Chau kau, who wrote Yuen li p'ien; and by Hu mu king, who wrote Po hio p'ien. Their main object was to diminish the number of strokes and make writing more rapid. The change was easily accomplished under an arbitrary and strong government such as China then had.

The Siau chwen comes next in order. In this writing there is a great preponderance of round curves and circles, instead of the squares which are common in the modern writing.

It was anciently much used on seals and flags. Hence it has been called by French and English authors the seal character. It is not, however, said of the Ta chwen that it was used on seals, so that the name is of doubtful propriety. It is better to transfer the Chinese word chwen. See in Kh the word li under radical tai 171.

It is the form used by Hü shu chung in the Shwo wen for the text. The explanations he wrote in the Li shu. The radicals of the Shwo wen in the Siau chwen are given in Appendix F to this work. The Li shu must now be considered. This form of writing was intermediate between the old and the new. It arose in the Han dynasty.

Many of the contractions of modern writing had their source in the Li shu. Thus, the two upright crosses, as in, crowning botanical words, are the contraction for t'sau "grass," introduced in the Han.1

In the T'sin dynasty public business greatly increased. Documents were multiplied. The seal character was felt to be cumbersome. A man named Li3 was ordered to prepare a more convenient mode of writing. The Li shu was the result, and it was named from its inventor.

Another account is that it was done in the peaceful times of the Han dynasty.

1 So the three dots on the left in words relating to water took the place in the Li shu of the three downstrokes which in the earlier writing represented water.

2 The word li means attached to government directly. The new writing might be so called as used by official persons. See in Kh R. 171, nine strokes.

A distinct approach is observable in the Li to the quick movement of the modern writing. The Li shu looks like the first writing done with a finely pointed brush. The width of the stroke increases or diminishes in certain circumstances. There is nothing of this feature in the Ta Chwen or Siau Chwen writing. In the Li shu it is quite distinct.

Two strokes are often run into one. A sharp angle takes the place of a round curve. A stroke with two curves in it becomes a stroke with one.

There is a careful avoidance of round curves. The sun and moon were formerly rounded in form. They became in the Li square and rectangular. See in the lithographs at the end.

A considerable change in form sometimes took place. Thus ngi "ought" had more anciently for its lower part the whole or half of to "many." So also te "to get" was formerly written with pei above, and yeu "hand" below.

Wang "king" E, and yü "jade" E, were first distinguished in the Li by adding a dot to the latter.

The contracted form of shui "water," as in

chung, was not

employed in the Chwen wen. The full form was then used in writing characters compounded of water and some phonetic. It appeared first in the Li.

The contracted form of JJ tau "knife" was first used in the Li shu, and from that time consisted of two vertical strokes on the right of compound characters.

Chu "go out" became

"earth" in the Li shu, in "to go out and amuse oneself." Here the suggestiveness of the combination of with fang "let loose," is lost sight of, and is only restored by a study of the ancient modes of writing.

The Kiai shu, or modern style of writing, dates from the period. of Wang hi chï, viz. A.D. 321 to 379. The Chinese have continued to write the same form of the character, and with the same materials, since that time. Specimens of his writing preserved on stone tablets are much sought after and admired.

The change which then took place in writing proceeded naturally from the introduction of new materials, such as paper, pencils of fine hair, and ink adapted to make fine strokes.

Since brushes with paint were used before this, the chief for