on, with numerous abbreviations and modifications. It was
afterwards known as the [Ch][Ch] _hsiao chuan_, or Lesser Seal, and is
familiar to us from the _Shuo Wen_ dictionary (see _Literature_).
Though a decided improvement on what had gone before, the Lesser Seal
was destined to have but a short career of undisputed supremacy.
Reform was in the air; and something less cumbrous was soon felt to be
necessary by the clerks who had to supply the immense quantity of
written reports demanded by the First Emperor. Thus it came about that
a yet simpler and certainly more artistic form of writing was already
in use, though not universally so, not long after the decree
abolishing the Greater Seal. This [Ch][Ch] _li shu_, or "official
script," as it is called, shows a great advance on the Seal character;
so much so that one cannot help suspecting the traditional account of
its invention. It is perhaps more likely to have been directly evolved
from the Greater Seal. If the Lesser Seal was the script of the
semi-barbarous state of Ch'in, we should certainly expect to find a
more highly developed system of writing in some of the other states.
Unlike the Seal, the _li shu_ is perfectly legible to one acquainted
only with the modern character, from which indeed it differs but in
minor details. How long the Lesser Seal continued to exist side by
side with the _li shu_ is a question which cannot be answered with
certainty. It was evidently quite obsolete, however, at the time of
the compilation of the _Shuo Wen_, about a hundred years after the
Christian era. As for the Greater Seal and still earlier forms of
writing, they were not merely obsolete but had fallen into utter
oblivion before the Han Dynasty was fifty years old. When a number of
classical texts were discovered bricked up in old houses about 150
B.C., the style of writing was considered so singular by the literati
of the period that they refused to believe it was the ordinary ancient
character at all, and nicknamed it _k'o-t'ou shu_, "tadpole
character," from some fancied resemblance in shape. The theory that
these tadpole characters were not Chinese but a species of cuneiform
script, in which the wedges might possibly suggest tadpoles, must be
dismissed as too wildly improbable for serious consideration; but we
may advert for a moment to a famous inscription in which the real
tadpole characters of antiquity