408 THOUGHTS ON THE FORMATION OF 



only such primary characters (he calls them by perhaps a better 

 name, 'indivisible or fundamental characters') as were rarely 

 found, or useless. To allow 200 for such omissions seems suf- 

 ficient. However that may be, I should propose the formation 

 of such a primary list, and its being printed in a tabular form, 

 as a frontispiece to the index. Gallery has done this with his 

 1039 phonetic characters, and they are all visible (and of a suf- 

 ficient size for clearness) at one opening of the book. These 

 being arranged in the manner already mentioned, the remainder 

 of the index is to be placed under these, as keys or headings. 

 Under each I would place, in order, all with which it combines : 

 first, all the simple characters ; then, all the binary characters, 

 and so on. No doubt there would be a good deal of repetition 

 in this ; every compound character would be entered twice at 

 least; those consisting of three elements, three times; and so 

 on. But the advantage of being able to find any character you 

 want with comparatively little trouble, as soon as you have 

 recognized one of the elements it is composed of, seems to out- 

 weigh this disadvantage, and perhaps about 80 quarto pages 

 would be enough for the index to a dictionary of thirty or forty 

 thousand characters. 



It is to be observed, and this I think a very important part 

 of the plan, that I do not propose to use compound characters 

 at all. The original 500, or whatever the number may be, would 

 be the whole number of characters used, and therefore of types 

 required. 



You are reading, we will suppose, a Chinese book, and come 

 to a character you do not know. Seeing that it consists of 

 woman, mouth, and heart, you look for it under any one of these 

 three characters, and in a little while find the other two grouped 

 side by side with a number which enables you to refer to the 

 body of the dictionary. 



There is but one character in the language made up of these 

 three elements, and therefore in order to recognize it without 

 ambiguity, it is not necessary that you should actually see it 

 before you in the index, or that you should even be told there 

 what you already know, that, to speak heraldically, woman oc- 

 cupies the dexter chief, and mouth the sinister. Some cases 

 undoubtedly there are probably only few in which the same 

 elements, differently arranged, form different characters; but 



