Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/174

Rh writing", or what is generally termed hieroglyphics. As scenes and circumstances became complicated, abbreviation was found necessary; and the principal part of an event was substituted for the whole; which has been called a curiologic hieroglyphic. A second mode of abridgment was by putting the instrument for the thing itself; which has been termed a tropical hieroglyphic. A third method, borrowed from the use of metaphor in language, was to make one thing stand for another; which has been denominated the symbolic hieroglyphic. This pictorial mode of writing, abridged as it was in the way above described, being insufficient for all the purposes of human intercourse, a certain number of arbitrary marks were invented, to express, not only mental conceptions, but visible objects. These went on increasing till they in some measure answered the purpose of a written medium.

The next step was the construction of Phonetic characters, which seems such a leap from the previous mode, that many have thought the human mind, unaided by Divine inspiration, incapable of discovering it. It consists in uniting, what has no connection in the nature of things, form and sound. Finding that vocables were numerous, and their component parts but few, it occurred to some remarkable genius that the words in common use might be resolved into their elements, and that it would be easier to invent arbitrary marks to represent the few elementary sounds than to construct new and different signs for the multitude of things. We cannot exactly say what led to the adoption of the particular signs for the elementary sounds which are found in most ancient alphabets; but the presumption is, that selecting the names of some very