410 THOUGHTS ON THE FORMATION OF 



is an incorrect phrase in speaking of Chinese printing) esta- 

 blished in the towns to which Europeans have now free access. 

 And it must be remembered that we could scarcely hope to pro- 

 duce in Europe what the Chinese would account a handsome 

 book. The softness of impressions from wood can hardly be 

 imitated with metallic type, and Chinese paper cannot, I believe, 

 be used in our printing presses. 



A collateral advantage, resulting from what is now proposed, 

 would be the facility of learning to read Chinese. The difficulty 

 of analysing the characters would be removed, and when once 

 a student was able to read a book printed in the new method, 

 the transition to the usual characters would not cause more dif- 

 ficulty than Greek contractions, or than the ligatures in Sanscrit. 

 Another advantage would be that as the characters would follow 

 one another in regular order, accompanied only by brackets to 

 form them into groups, and by a few simple diacritical signs, 

 any ordinary compositor would be able to set them up. Pro- 

 bably it would not be found very difficult to distinguish the 

 phonetical elements by printing them with red ink, which to 

 beginners would be a great assistance. By similar means we 

 might distinguish the same character, according as in any sen- 

 tence it presented itself as a noun or as a verb. 



Brockhaus has proposed a different way of printing Chinese 

 for European use, namely, in Roman letters with a numerical 

 reference under each word to its place in the dictionary he wishes 

 to see made. 



There are two or three objections to this plan. In the first 

 place, difficult as it is to remember Chinese characters, it would 

 be found much more difficult to remember the meaning of a 

 number, even with the help of the pronunciation, because num- 

 bers give very little for the mind to fasten on, and can never be 

 exclusively associated with a single class of ideas. Imagine the 

 difficulty of remembering the plot of a story the persons in which 

 were denoted only by numbers. 



Again, in all questions relating to what I think must, by 

 and bye, form an interesting part of comparative philology, 

 namely, the theory of the Chinese characters, such a plan would 

 be useless, even if we could suppose that all Chinese scholars 

 agreed to use the same dictionary. 



Lastly, this method would form no introduction to the study 



