and "dog-meat" would both be found
under Radical "dog" with four strokes, and so on. The two hundred and
fourteen Radicals are themselves arranged in groups according to the
number of strokes; so that it is not a very arduous task to turn up
ordinary characters in a Chinese dictionary. Finally, although Chinese
is a monosyllabic and non-alphabetic language, a method has been
devised, and has been in use since the 3rd century A.D., by which the
sound of any word can be indicated in a dictionary otherwise than by
simply quoting a word of similar sound, which of course may be equally
unknown to the searcher. Thus, the sound of a word pronounced _ching_
can be exhibited by selecting two words, one having the initial _ch_,
and the other a final _ing_. E.g. the sound _ching_ is given as _chien
ling_; that is _ch[ien l]ing = ching_.

_The Concordance._--Considering the long unbroken series of years
during which Chinese literature has always, in spite of many losses,
been steadily gaining in bulk, it is not astonishing to find that
classical, historical, mythological and other allusions to personages
or events of past times have also grown out of all proportion to the
brain capacity even of the most brilliant student. Designed especially
to meet this difficulty, there are several well-known handbooks,
elementary and advanced, which trace such allusions to their source
and provide full and lucid explanations; but even the most extensive
of these is on a scale incommensurate with the requirements of the
scholar. Again, it is due to the emperor K'ang Hsi that we possess one
of the most elaborate compilations of the kind ever planned and
carried to completion. The _P'ei Wen Yuen Fu_, or Concordance to
Literature, is a key, not only to allusions in general, but to all
phraseology, including allusions, idiomatic expressions and other
obscure combinations of words, to be found in the classics, in the
dynastic histories, and in all poets, historians, essayists, and
writers of recognized eminence in their own lines. No attempt at
explanation is given; but enough of the passage, or passages, in which
the phrase occurs, is cited to enable the reader to gather the meaning
required. The trouble, of course, lies with the arrangement of these
phrases in a non-alphabetic language. Recourse has been had to the
Rhymes and the five Tones (see _Language_); and all phrases which