VOL. XXXVI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 42Q 



and so the other 57 names. These names are composed of two sorts of characters, 

 very famous among the Chinese, who gel them by heart in their youth, and 

 employ them on a thousand occasions. Those of the first sort are 10 in num- 

 ber, and are called the year-letters; those of the second, 12, and are named 

 hour-letters. These two sorts of characters are combined, by repeating the 

 10 year-letters 6 times, and the 12 hour-letters but 5 times; for 6 times 10, 

 and 5 times 12 equally make 60: and from this combination result 6o names 

 for the 6o years that compose the cycle. These three points well compre- 

 hended suffice for the use and understanding of the chronological table. 



The Chinese pretend that these 22 letters were invented by a very ancient 

 king, whom they name (5) Hoang Ti, in order to determine the beginning, 

 progress, end, and successive periods of a great year ; for they have one which 

 includes a certain number of ages, though its total duration be no where dis- 

 tinctly marked. They say the great year is successively at Kia, at y, and at 

 Ping. Now it is no easy matter to determine the extent of these different 

 parts of the great period (for there is room to conjecture that they are unequal) 

 how long, for example, lasts that which commences at (6) Kia, that at (7) y, 

 and so of the rest; nay, it is perhaps impossible, for want of certain principles, 

 the knowledge of which is entirely lost. When the year was at Kia, which 

 seems to signify when it began, this point of time, according to tradition, is 

 called (8) O fong; when it was at y, this is called (p) Tcheou Mong; when at 

 (lO) Ping, the name given to it was (I l) Jeou Tchao. 



Every one of the other \g letters has in this manner a word for its device; 

 but as it is plain, that all these words are very strange to European ears, and 

 that those which remain are as obscure and barbarous as Kia Tse, Y mao, 

 Keng chin, M. Foucquet omits mentioning them. 



Yet it is not easily believed that these words are void of all meaning, or that 

 the letters, whose names they are, are figures made at hazard, or arbitrarily 

 imagined. The inventor of these names must have proposed himself some 

 end. It is already known in general, and is demonstrated elsewhere, that 

 the characters preserved by the Chinese, but much more ancient than them, 

 are true hieroglyphics. It is also known, and strongly demonstrated, that 

 the doctrine veiled under the appearance of these hieroglyphics, is very myste- 

 rious and sublime: and it is unreasonable to regard as nonsense, and reject such 

 as we understand not, purely because we do not understand them. And indeed 

 when we closely examine the 22 letters in question, we perceive in several of 

 them something very mysterious, which the Chinese themselves present us 

 with without understanding them. 



This so useful cycle, which in the printed history is a certain rule to fix time. 



