evil connected with it. Some time before the confinement of the unfortunate individual, a quantity of salt is secretly thrown by one of her friends into a jar of water used by the family; and if a person, not knowing what has happened, tastes of the water, and remarks upon its saltness, the spell of the Salt Lake is broken. This may serve as a specimen of a large number of tricks, or charms, which are resorted to under different circumstances to avert anticipated evil.

The particular year in which a person is born has also much to do in directing his steps during future life. Each of the twelve characters used in reckoning time is associated with some animal. Hence a person, according to the character which occurs in the year when he was born, is said to have been born under the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, etc. A person born under a particular character, or animal, must not engage in any important work or public ceremony on days the names of which contain a character clashing with the character occurring in his birth-year. Exceptions are made allowing persons to attend the funerals of their relatives, when they would otherwise be excluded by this rule. On days of public meetings, placards are often posted by officers, in conspicuous places, designating the class of persons whose horoscope renders it inauspicious for them to be present, and requesting them to stay at home.

Passing over other superstitions of a similar kind, that of seeking directions and revelations in dreams is worthy of special notice. The deities of some few temples have acquired great celebrity by giving important intimations to their worshipers in visions of the night. On certain days, generally the last great festival of the year, these temples are visited by a large concourse of people, of whom some come from a great distance. Their object is, for the most part, to seek direction with reference to improving their condition in life by a change of occupation at the beginning of the coming year. They arrive at the temple before night, burn incense, make prostrations, and present their prayers before the gods, and

SEEKING DREAMS IN IDOL TEMPLES.

193

then lie down in some part of the temple, generally on the cold floor, to wait for a dream. Those who are so fortunate as to have one, put such an interpretation upon it as to suit their own fancies and inclinations; some receive as a dream the vagaries of their own imaginations, which are sure to be busy about the absorbing matter which engages their attention; and some, less credulous and imaginative, are obliged to go home dreamless and disappointed. To avoid the inconveniences of going to a remote temple, a person sometimes makes his bed in the kitchen, to beg a dream of the Kitchen God.

The above superstitions appear in themselves too frivolous and unreasonable to engage our serious attention. They acquire their interest and importance from the fact that they are not curious antiquities, but present realities; they are not theoretical speculations confined to the few, but practical beliefs of universal prevalence, swaying the minds of millions, and presenting a most serious obstacle to the reception of the truth. These beliefs are nicely adapted to the hopes and fears of man's nature, and are clung to with great tenacity by those whose reason has been moulded and enslaved by them. Fate and a thousand inferior deities take the place of an infinite and omnipresent God, and render it difficult for the mind even to conceive of his universal sovereignty and overruling providence.

I

CHAPTER XIV.

THE LANGUAGES OF CHINA.

The Want of Analogy between the Chinese and other Languages.— Each Word represented by a separate Character.-The Language not Hieroglyphic. The whole Number of Characters.-The Language Monosyllabic.—The written Language unintelligible to the Ear, and not capable of being used as a spoken Language.-An Explanation of this Fact.-Tones and Aspirates.-Explanation of apparent Inconsistencies. -The spoken Languages of China, and their Relations to the written. -The Number of the spoken Languages or Dialects, and the Extent to which they differ.-In what these Differences consist.-More numerous in the South than in the North.--Description of the Mandarin, or Court Dialect.-Chinese Mode of printing.---"How much Time does it require to learn the Chinese Language ?"—" What Proportion of the Population can read ?"-Excellences and Defects of the Language.

I APPROACH the task of writing on the languages of China with no small degree of reluctance and embarrassment, on account of the great difficulty of making the subject intelligible to those who have not made it a special study. This difficulty arises from an utter want of correspondence or analogy between this language and others with which we are familiar a fact which furnishes a striking evidence of the extreme isolation of the Chinese race from the other nations of the world.

The written language contains no alphabet, but each word has its own independent representation or character, so that there are as many characters as words. In the first formation of the written language, which must have been at a very early period, these characters seem to have been ideographic, and must have been very few: for instance, stood for the sun, for the moon, etc. The present forms of these characters are

and J.

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195

The impossibility of inventing forms which would naturally suggest every object in nature and every idea of the mind, necessitated the use of characters more or less arbitrary: for instance, ▲ jin, man; puh, not; ta, great;

nyu, woman. Some of the characters are simple like the preceding, but by far the greater part are compounded of simple characters: assi, to wash; che, to point. Si is compounded of shwuy, water, on the left, and sin, before, on the right; che is compounded of sheo, hand, on the left, and che, meaning or intention, on the right. In both these characters, as may be readily seen, the left part suggests the meaning, and the right the sound, and many combinations are similarly formed. The simple character heart, for instance, is a component part of many others representing faculties and affections of the mind. The character man is connected with others representing the different dispositions and relations of man, and so on indefinitely, the different component parts giving some hint or clew to the discovery of the meaning, and perhaps also of the sound. This is not always nor generally the case, however; for many of the combinations seem entirely arbitrary, as tah, to answer or respond; being made up of chuh, bamboo, and hoh, to unite; also 1 yi, righteousness or uprightness, which is composed of jin, man, on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand yang, sheep, on the top, and wo, I, on the bottom.

I have referred thus particularly to the formation of characters, so as to correct two very common mistakes, both tending to produce the impression that the written language is much easier of acquisition than it really is. The first is, that the language, as now written, may be properly called ideographic. The fact is, on the contrary, that even the few characters which seem to have been such at first do not, in their present forms, indicate with any certainty the object represented. Most of the simple characters are, or seem to be, entirely arbitrary; and the compound characters, which give some intimation of their meaning, do it very vaguely

and indefinitely. The other mistake is that of supposing, that though the language has no alphabet, the elementary characters unite together, according to a system governed by fixed rules, and affording advantages tantamount or, at least, similar to those of an alphabet, which is by no means the The mistake, however, has a slight foundation in fact,

case.

and is an error only in degree.

The whole number of characters in the Imperial Dictionary of the Emperor Kang-hi, which is complete in six large volumes, is about 40,000; most of these, however, as is the case with the larger proportion of words in our own large dictionaries, are obsolete forms, or characters very seldom used. From five to seven thousand comprise all those in ordinary use. These characters are unvarying in their forms, and admit of no inflections of any kind whatever. Distinctions of number, tense, etc., are made by the use of additional characters.

The languages of China, whether written or spoken, are strictly monosyllabic; that is, every syllable is a distinct word by itself. Occasionally two or more characters are used together as a compound word; but they are still seen to be distinct monosyllables as, in our language, farm-house, footstool, etc.

It is a striking peculiarity of the written or classical language, that it is not understood as spoken. By this it is not meant that it has fallen into disuse as a spoken language, but that it is not capable of being used as a medium of oral communication even by the learned who are familiar with it. It speaks to the eye, and not to the ear. The Scriptures, or any other book, or a letter, accurately read to a person unacquainted with its contents, though perfectly familiar with the language in which it is written, would be almost, if not entirely, unintelligible. This fact may be best explained by referring to the monosyllabic character of this language. The number of monosyllables which it is possible to form with the vocal organs or spell with an alphabet is necessarily limited. In