s seen at once to possess a marked characteristic
of its own. It consists of a number of wholly independent units, each of
which would fit into a small square, and is called a character. These
characters are arranged in columns, beginning on the right-hand side of
the page and running from top to bottom. They are _words_, inasmuch as
they stand for articulate sounds expressing root-ideas, but they are
unlike our words in that they are not composed of alphabetical elements
or letters. Clearly, if each character were a distinct and arbitrarily
constructed symbol, only those gifted with exceptional powers of memory
could ever hope to read or write with fluency. This, however, is far
from being the case. If we go to work synthetically and first see how
the language is built up, it will soon appear that most Chinese
characters are susceptible of some kind of analysis. We may accept as
substantially true the account of native writers who tell us that means
of communication other than oral began with the use of knotted cords,
similar to the _quippus_ of ancient Mexico and Peru, and that these were
displaced later on by the practice of notching or scoring rude marks on
wood, bamboo and stone. It is beyond question that the first four
numerals, as written with simple horizontal strokes, date from this
early period. Notching, however, carries us but a little way on the road
to a system of writing, which in China, as elsewhere, must have sprung
originally from pictures. In Chinese writing, especially, the
indications of such an origin are unmistakable, a few characters,
indeed, even in their present form, being perfectly recognizable as
pictures of objects pure and simple. Thus, for "sun" the ancient Chinese
drew a circle with a dot in it: [Ch], now modified into [Ch]; for "moon"
[Ch], now [Ch]; for "God" they drew the anthropomorphic figure [Ch],
which in its modern form appears as [Ch]; for "mountains" [Ch], now [Ch];
for "child" [Ch], now [Ch]; for "fish" [Ch], now [Ch]; for "mouth" a
round hole, now [Ch]; for "hand" [Ch], now [Ch]; for "well" [Ch], now
written without the dot. Hence we see that while the origin of all
writing is pictographic, in Chinese alone of living languages certain
pictures have survived, and still denote what they had denoted in the
beginning. In the script of other countries they were gradually
transformed into hieroglyphic symbols, after which they either
disappeared altogether or became further conventi