Ano while we are in the way of making gratuitous and valuable suggestions, we would also ask whether apy ove out of the mixed multitude of professional and amateur sino. logness has ever studied Chinese slang.
Argot," according to Littré, is a language confined to vagabonds, beggars and robbers, and understood by them only, Whatafoarfal accusation! Why there is a whole section of French literature, not the most ennobling, we confess, which is absolutely uninteleligible without the key furnished by 8 familiarity with slang. There is even a grammar of slang. Would our ronders like to he able to conjugate a well-known verb in an ill known way? Take the present indicative of dormir:—Je dors; tu pionces; il rou. bille; nous cassons notre cane; vous pique votre chien; ils talent de Vail. Vagabonds is an elastic term and would probably include the people who are most familiar with this Inugange, its accidence and its syntax, but there are many very amusing and harmless persons, though perhaps not very wise, who talk in this fashion habitually, and when they write a story, write it fin this reprehensible fashion also. But the more quaint, oven the more j idiotic any slang is, the more curious is likely to be an enguiry into its origin. Every language that we know of has an argot, and many have more than form unintelligible except to the inated. Most of us have n certain rity with English and American slang—not the lnngange of thieves, be it remarked, which may be studied in Paul Cliford, and the most recent sustained composition in which is given by the Rev. J. W. Horsley in the October Macmillan—German has its form or forms, and Italian is peculiar rich in this possession. The materials for an investigation into Chinese slang lie on every bookstall at every corner, but hardly any of them have yet been touched, to say nothing of being exhausted. It would probably be found that the process of degrade. tion applied to a language follows very much the same lines of direction i i, as elsewhere, and therefore many curious analogies between the slang dialects adopted in parts of the world most remote from one another, might reasounbly be anticipated. Of leourse an intimate familiarity with Chinese would be required in whoever should undertake the task we indicate.
He would also be all the better for a thorough impregnation with the slangs of the western world, and Inst, though not Toast, he should have some gleers of bamour surviving the depres influences of his previous Chinese studies.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.