OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 65 



very clearly stated by Mr. Lay, and is supported by a few illustra- 

 tions so utterly fanciful as fully to justify M. Gallery in deriding them. 



" M. Gallery denies the existence of this conamon element of 

 thought among ideas signified either by the same syllabic toord or 

 by sign-words having a common primitive (phonetic). He holds 

 that that part of a compound character called the primitive, havino- 

 been originally invented to represent a syllabic word in a given sense, 

 was then transferred to and combined with other sign-words, repre- 

 senting the same syllabic word in senses totally different, and for 

 the sole purpose of indicating that the pronunciation is still the same." 



Mr. A. further observed, that several of the terms which he now 

 employed, such as syllabic word, sign-word, and tone-word, were 

 his own ; that he employed them in order to render more palpable 

 the differences between these learned writers, as he was able to 

 gather them from their works, than he could do by quoting their own 

 language. It was with extreme diffidence that he ventured to dis- 

 sent from so ripe and distinguished a scholar as M. Gallery. His 

 own studies had led him, however, before he was aware that any 

 such view had been advanced, to the conviction that the theory which 

 he had just now stated, as that of Mr. Lay (and which it must be 

 admitted is but obscurely defined and poorly sustained by Mr. Lay 

 himself), is true. He believes, also, that the observations made by 

 M. Gallery (though not his theory), are true likewise, and that the 

 former furnishes the reason of the latter. 



In other words, Mr. A. believes, as previously stated to the Acad- 

 emy, that " all the numerous meanings of the same vocal syllable 

 or word in the Ghinese language, being in some instances as many 

 as several hundreds, and seeming at first view to have no connection 

 with each other, are in fact legitimately and closely related in idea, 

 or that all of these numerous significations constitute a family of 

 ideas, which family is denoted generically by the single Ghinese sylla- 

 bic word, and specifically in other languages by a family of words, 

 which then have corresponding etymological relationships, and spe- 

 cifically likewise in the Ghinese written system, first, by groups of 

 homophonous sign-words, having a different primitive to each group, 

 and then by the particular sign-words within each group having dif- 

 ferent modifiers. Or, differently stated, that a given group of Ghinese 

 sign-words have the same primitive, not merely because they sound 

 alike, but that they both have the same primitive and do sound alike 



