A CHINESE DICTIONARY. 409 



nothing can be easier than to devise diacritical signs ; by which 

 the same group of characters should be made to refer, without 

 possibility of mistake, to the different compound characters. 



Take a simple instance already noticed. Under corn you 

 find mouth, accompanied by an arrow pointing to the right, and 

 again a mouth with the arrow pointing upwards. The reference 

 to the first would be, to ho in the sense of comfort, and to the 

 second to ho in the sense of crying ; for in the first case mouth 

 stands to the right of corn, and in the second above it. 



This principle once admitted, namely, that a character may 

 be as clearly recognized by means of its elements alone as if 

 a fac simile of it were given, may of course be applied much 

 more widely than merely to forming the index of a dictionary. 

 It seems to furnish the solution of the chief difficulty by which 

 the study of Chinese has hitherto been impeded. For we thus 

 get a mezzo termine between the unintelligibility of Chinese 

 written with Koman characters, and the impracticable expense 

 of a complete fount of Chinese type. Even if we had the 3000 

 elements*, which the ingenuity of Breitkopf has devised, where 

 should we, here in Cambridge at least, find a compositor suf- 

 ficiently learned to put them together ? 



The reason why so many more elements are required to 

 imitate compound characters, than are necessary, if we content 

 ourselves with simply representing them, is of course the varia- 

 tion in size and shape, requisite in order to give uniformity in 

 these respects to the compound character. This uniformity of 

 size and contour is a matter of Chinese taste with which in 

 books intended for European use we need not trouble ourselves. 

 It is, by the way, an inconvenient taste even for the Chinese, 

 because in order to make complex characters distinct, the simpler 

 ones must be unnecessarily large. If it be said that the Chinese 

 would never become accustomed to characters of the proposed 

 kind, we may answer that even if this be so, the necessity of 

 printing in Europe books intended for Chinese use is not very 

 obvious. 



Whatever may have been the case formerly, there can hence- 

 forth be probably no difficulty to hinder the printing whatever 

 is intended to be read in China, at presses (which, by the way, 



* Am I right in thinking there are 3000 type elements ? or are there only 3000 

 punches ? 



