CHINESE PUZZLEDOM 140 



but necromancers and geomancers who deal in magic and 

 dabble in the occult, and those who find a livelihood in 

 fortune-telling, pretend to explain this deep-rooted and 

 impenetrable mystery. De Gnignes endeavoured to prove 

 the common origin of the Chinese and Egyptians.* What- 

 ever may be thought of his arguments based chiefly on the 

 resemblances of certain Chinese characters with Egyptian 

 hieroglyphs as analysed and interpreted by Horus Apollo, 

 we have, at all events, in the I Ching nothing less than the 

 Sphinx of Chinese book-lore. Here then is a mammoth 

 puzzle from pre-historic times, still waiting solution. Almost 

 on a par with this book are the dark vaticinations of the 

 Tui Pel T'u ( W. ft 1) by Li Ch'un-feng ( & & Jft) and 

 Yuan T'ien-kang ( ;» 5c § ) of the T'ang dynasty, and the 

 Shao Ping Ko (fM ffi m ) by Liu Po-wen (III f6 f&) of the 

 Ming dynasty; but these books contain predictions of a 

 political nature only. 



Regarding popular literature such as the San Kuo Chih 

 ( H Hi i£> ) or "History of the Three Kingdoms," and the 

 IAeh Kuo 'Chih (3?iJ M 5fe ) or "History of the Contending 

 States," there is so much fiction interwoven into them, 

 and so many anachronisms, that it is impossible to sift the 

 believable from the unbelievable, for the reason that the 

 dividing line is invisible. Lord Macaulay's remark anent 

 some of the tales of Herodotus applies here: he says, "The 

 fictions are so much like the facts, and the facts so much like 

 the fictions, that with respect to many most interesting 

 particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but 

 remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. 

 We know that there is truth ; but we cannot exactlv decide 

 where it lies." That is the point, "we cannot exactly 

 decide w T here it lies." 



Turning to the written characters, we find ourselves 

 again confronted with no paltry affair. The characters, or 

 sinograms as Wylie calls them, consist of symbols, or signs, 

 more or less arbitrary and more or less bewildering. Some 

 of them are compound, that is to say they are composed of 

 two or more symbols, which are classified as "radicals" and 

 "primitives," or "phonetics"; but many characters though 

 containing the same "phonetics" are not homophonous. 

 On the other hand, many characters not bearing the slightest 

 resemblance to each other do have the same sound, while 

 many have more than one sound and most of them have 

 no end of meanings. A certain class of characters are called 



*"Memoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une Colonie 

 Egyptienne." — a.d. 1758. 



