Ir is certainly flattering (but often, we may confess to ourselves, a trifle embarrassing) that visitors should assume that each resident among us knows all there is to be known about China. Ignorance, we feel, would be misplaced and the consequence is a constant strain on the imagination which is assuredly not good for it in so warm a climate. But sometimes questions crop up which do not lend themselves to the imaginative treatment. One such (fortunately rarely raised) is: How do you telegraph in Chinese? We say, rarely raised, because the ordinary visitor has not knowledge enough to suspect any difficulty, and having once noticed and approved the presence of telegraph poles in China, considers that subject exhausted. Indeed, (for let us be candid) are the majority of us more than vaguely aware that the Chinese have some system of telegraphing which is not very simple and which is by no means satisfactory? A. twelvemonth or 30 ago some enthusiast in the Recorder attacked this system, by way of introduction to a scheme of his own (the Chinese Recorder has been auch given over of late to schemes for the amelioration of Chinese methods of comuttuication whether in speech or writing) and now a much more elaborate paper on "'Telegraphy in China" has appeared in AN the Year ound, partly, it would seem, in answer to the enthusiast's proposals. The writer has plainly taken the trouble to study his subject, and though he too has his panacea to push he does not bring it prominently forward. Writing for home readers he jas first to explain wherein the difficulty lay,—the fact that the Chinese written language has no alpha-
rate sign, He illustrates his meaning bet, but employs for each word @ sepa by the character for sux, Bf, which he says "is in effect a picture." (This last statement will strike many of his readers as somewhat bold, since too few will have had the advantage of studying Mr. Hopkins' Six Scripts amd of taking sides in the celebrated controversy as to the presence, or absence, in the sun of a black bird.) The writer then briefly explains the different: systems which have been from time to time advocated by various well-wishers of Chinese Telegraphy. A sign for each of the 44,000 characters was plainly beyond the powers of the most extensive dial-plate (they had dial-plates in those days), and even the comparatively moderate demand of a symbol apiece for each of the phonetics and radicals,—there are 1,254 of them,—was abandoned as hopeless. Dr. Macgowan in 1851 suggested that the nine strokes to which the Chinese writing is in theory, but not in practice, confined might furnish forth the desired system, a suggestion which apparently fell flat. The writer of the paper before us gives coat reasons for this failure, then attacks the question of telegraph by transliteration, which the outhissing of the Zecorder had declared to be "the only practical solution." That it would be a practical solution in the limited area of a single dialect might be true enough; if natives of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.