402 THOUGHTS ON THE FORMATION OF 



pared to the letters with which our words are spelled, in this 

 respect at least, that a Chinaman, in writing a given character, 

 will always employ them in a given order, just as when we write 

 man we write the m first, the a next, and so on. 



Gallery affirms, that throughout China a uniform method of 

 forming the characters obtains, though little is said by Chinese 

 writers on the subject. Some directions, he remarks, have been 

 given, but too vague to be of much utility. I do not know if 

 he refers to a tract, of which Sir John Davis published an ac- 

 count in the Transactions of the Koyal Society of Literature. 

 A collection of characters arranged according to the order in 

 which the elementary strokes are employed will, as similar cases 

 continually recur, very soon enable any one, even without in- 

 struction, to acquire a knowledge of the Chinese method. This 

 arrangement is of course based upon giving an order of prece- 

 dence to the nine elementary strokes analogous to the order of 

 the letters of the alphabet. But this the Chinese themselves 

 do not seem to have done, and without this step, however de- 

 finite their method of forming the characters, no principle of 

 arrangement could be hence obtained. That they should never 

 have introduced this improvement, is one of the many instances 

 of the mixture of sterility and ingenuity by which they seem to 

 be distinguished. 



When we have learned the order in which the strokes are 

 to be employed in forming characters, and have given an order 

 to the strokes themselves, we are in possession of a principle 

 in virtue of which all the characters of the language may be 

 arranged, so to speak, alphabetically. In practice, however, it 

 is desirable to combine this principle with others, and especially 

 with that which results from the analysis of which the great 

 majority of characters obviously admit. It is clearly more con- 

 venient to arrange the characters in the first instance according 

 to the number of strokes, than to set out with a purely alpha- 

 betical arrangement ; and this is the plan followed by both 

 Gon^alves and Gallery, in their vocabulary of primary charac- 

 ters. The arrangement therefore may be compared to that of 

 a spelling-book, in which lists of short words arranged alpha- 

 betically are followed by similar lists of longer ones. 



Thus far there seems no reason to deviate from their method; 

 but the question becomes more difficult when we inquire what 



