n, and the insertion of
woodcuts must necessarily belong to a comparatively late age (see
_Military Writers_).

Shuo Wen.

With the _Shuo Wen_, or Explanation of Written Words, we begin the
long list of lexicographical works which constitute such a notable
feature in Chinese literature. A scholar, named Hsue Shen, who died
about A.D. 120, made an effort to bring together and analyse all the
characters it was possible to gather from the written language as it
existed in his own day. He then proceeded to arrange these
characters--about ten thousand in all--on a system which would enable
a student to find a given word without having possibly to search
through the whole book. To do this, he simply grouped together all
such as had a common part, more or less indicative of the meaning of
each, much as though an English dictionary were to consist of such
groups as

Dog-days
Dog-kennel
Dog-collar
Dog-meat
Dog-nap

and so on.

Horse-collar
Horse-flesh
Horse-back
Horse-fly
Horse-chestnut

and so on.

Hsue Shen selected five hundred and forty of these common parts, or
Radicals (see _Language_), a number which, as will be seen later on,
was found to be cumbrously large; and under each Radical he inserted
all the characters belonging to it, but with no particular order or
arrangement, so that search was still, in many cases, quite a
laborious task. The explanations given were chiefly intended to
establish the pictorial origin of the language; but whereas no one now
disputes this as a general conclusion, the steps by which Hsue Shen
attempted to prove his theory must in a large number of instances be
dismissed as often inadequate and sometimes ridiculous. Nevertheless,
it was a great achievement; and the _Shuo Wen_ is still indispensable
to the student of the particular script in vogue a century or two
before Christ. It is also of value in another sense. It may be used,
with discretion, in testing the genuineness of an alleged ancient
document, which, if an important or well-known document before the age
of Hsue Shen, would not be likely to contain characters not given in
his work. Under this test the _Tao Te Ching_, for instance, breaks
down (see _Huai-nan Tz[)u]_).

Passing over a long series of dictionaries and vocabularies which
appeared at various dates, some constructed on Hsue Shen's plan, wit