relationship are still obscure. But the structural accordance is here, evidently, a pretty sure sign of common descent. If monosyllabic tongues were of frequent occurrence among human races, it, for instance, we met with one group of them in China, another in Africa, and another in America, we should have no right to infer that they were all genetically related; for it is, beyond all question, hypothetically possible that different divisions of mankind should be characterized by a kindred inaptitude for linguistic development. When, however, we find the known languages of this type clustered together in one corner of a single continent, we cannot well resist the conviction that they are all dialects of one original tongue, and that their differences, however great these may be, are the result of discordant historic growth.
Infinitely the most important member of the monosyllabic group or family is the Chinese: its history is exceeded in interest by that of very few other known tongues. Its earliest literary records (some of the odes of the Shi-King, 'Book of Songs') claim to go back to nearly two thousand years before Christ, and the annals and traditions of the race reach some centuries farther, so that Chinese antiquity almost exceeds in hoariness both Semitic and Indo-European. China, indeed, in the primitiveness and persistency of its language, its arts, and its polity, is one of the most remarkable and exceptional phenomena which the story of our race presents. It has maintained substantially the same speech and the same institutions, by uninterrupted transmission from generation to generation upon the same soil, all the way down to our own times from a period in the past at which every Indo-European people of which we know aught was but a roving tribe of barbarians. Elsewhere, change has been the dominating principle; in China, permanency. Nor has this permanency been quietism and stagnation. China has had, down even to modern times, no insignificant share of activity and progress, though always within certain limits, and never of a radical and revolutionary character. She has been one of the very few great centres of culture and enlightenment which the world has known; and her culture has been not less original in its beginnings, and almost more
