Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IV.djvu/496

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484 CHINA (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) was already in print. Some few specimens of the Sung dynasty typography are still to be found in libraries, but they are very rare. The mounted manuscript rolls seem to have been im- mediately succeeded by long strips, printed on one side, and doubled up in a succession of folds to a book size. This practice is still con- tinued for the sacred books of the Buddhists. The next step in advance was the folded sheets stitched together in volumes, as is the practice at the present day. In the llth century a scheme for printing by movable clay type was invented by a mechanic named Pelh Shing ; we have a minute detail of the process, but there is no account of its having been brought into use; and it is not till the 17th century that we hear of movable type being actually employed in printing. A font of copper types was then made in the imperial printing office, and the Koo kin foo shoo tseih ching, a gigan- tic collection of books in 6,000 volumes, was printed with them. The types, however, hav- ing fallen out of use, a large proportion of them were purloined by untrustworthy offi- cials, and the remainder melted up to conceal the fraud. In the following century a set of wooden types was made in the same establish- ment, for the purpose of printing another col- lection, the Sue koo tseuen shoo, noticed above, the printed catalogue of which contains about 3,440 separate works, comprising upward of 78,000 books or sections. The use of these types, however, has been very limited. At present the " Peking Gazette," the daily offi- cial organ of the government, is printed with movable wooden type ; but both the type and the manipulation are of the clumsiest order, and the impression is one of the rudest speci- mens of typography that can be found. The printing press has not yet been introduced there. Some private firms have used movable copper types for printing for nearly a century past, and in 1850 we are told of a bookseller in Canton who had cast 150,000 tin types from clay matrices. The specimen of them given in the " Chinese Repository " is very creditable to the artist. About 40 years ago the Rev. Sam- uel Dyer, of the London missionary society, ini- tiated the use of movable type for China ac- cording to the European method. The same work was carried on to perfection by Mr. Cole, and subsequently by Mr. Gamble of the Ameri- can Presbyterian mission ; and so great has been the success of the latter, that not only are his types used by several European firms, but a considerable number of Chinese have also commenced printing with movable types after the western fashion. Some of the na- tives have also commenced type founding, and even the making of electrotypes. Books are thus being printed and newspapers put into circulation, and it is difficult to foretell what may be the result of this new impetus. V. SINOLOGY. The study of the Chinese language and literature in Europe is almost entirely a growth of the present century, previous to which very few besides the Roman Catholic missionaries had any knowledge of the subject. The first grammar we hear of was printed at Canton in 1703, in the Mandarin dialect, with the title Arte de la lengua mandarina, by Father Francis Varo. Bayer published his Museum Sinicum in 2 vols. at St. Petersburg in 1730. This contains a short Mandarin gram- mar, and another of the dialect of Chinchov in Fokien ; also a Chinese vocabulary. Four- inont in France was engaged on kindred studies, and in 1742 published his Lingua Sinarum Mandarinicce Hieroglyphics Grammatica du- plex, which proves to be a slightly modified translation of Varo's grammar. Five years later he published his dissertation on the writ- ten language, Meditationes Sinicce, a work full of errors. Little else of a philological character appeared in the last century, and any slight in- terest that might have been created seemed to be on the decline, when Remusat was appointed professor of the Chinese language in Paris in 1815. The lectures and writings of this dis- tinguished sinologue began to draw the atten- tion of Europeans to China as a great fact, and to invest the literature of the nation with a new interest. His successor, M. Julien, has fully sustained the reputation of the chair. The following are the principal works of a philological character that have appeared : DICTIONARIES. 1. In Latin. Dictionnairefran- cois et latin, composed by Father Basil de Glemona and edited by De Guignes (Paris, 1813). The first part of a supplement to this, by Klaproth, was issued in 1819, containing scarcely a quarter of the whole, but no more was published. De Guignes's was republished at Hong Kong in 1853, without the French, as Dictionarium Sinico-Latinum. Goncalvez, Vocabularium Latino- Sinicum (Macao, 1836), Lexicon Manuale Latino- Sinicum (1839), and Lexicon Magnum Latino- Sinicum (1841). Cal- lery, Sy sterna Phonetico-scriptura Sinicce (Ma- cao, 1841), arranged on a peculiar phonetic system of his own device. Ferny, Vocabula- rium Latino- Sinicum (China, 1861). 2. Por- tuguese. Goncalvez, Diccionario Portuguez- China (Macao, 1831), and Diccionario China- Portuguez (1833). 3. French. Perny, Diction- naire francais-latin-chinois de la langue man- darine parlee (Paris, 1869), with an appendix as large (1872). 4. Russian. Grajitcheskaya sistema kitdiskikh ieroglifov (St. Petersburg, 1 867) ; Esaiya, Pusko-kitaiski sloxar (Peking, 1867), and Predovlenie ' rusko-kitaukomu slovariu (1870). 5. English. Morrison, "Dic- tionary of the Chinese Language " (6 vols. 4to, Macao, 181o-'23); 2d part, "Alphabetic Chi- nese and English" (republished at Shanghai, 2 vols. 8vo, 1865) ; " Vocabulary of the Can- ton Dialect " (Macao, 1828); Medhurst, "Chi- nese and English Dictionary" (Batavia, 1842- '3), and "English and Chinese Dictionary" (Shanghai, 1847-'8); Lobscheid, "English and Chinese Dictionary " (4 vols., Hong Kong, 1869), and "A Chinese and English Dictionary"