MANY eminent philologists suggest a time in the history of human speech when language was monosyllabic, when by a few simple utterances human beings were able to express many things, indicating by gesture or tone which of the words having the same sound was the thing expressed. Later on we find language developed by the connection of two or three of these root words, agglutinated, or stuck together as one word, by which this obtained a broader meaning. This is the first stage in polysyllabism, and is known as the agglutinative stage. Later, human speech passed into the inflectional stage, where these agglutinated words having coalesced or melted into one, became so changed in time by phonetic corruption that finally it becomes impossible to determine which part was the original root and which the modifying element of the earlier stage. Of the monosyllabic stage in language, the Chinese is a distinguished example. This language is referred to by many eminent philologists as the most primitive in structure of any living tongue. It is a language of monosyllabic roots, limited in number, these roots possessing neither inflections nor parts of speech. Each word is a root and each root is a word, which in turn may be used, according to its place in a sentence, as a verb, a noun, an adjective, a participle, or some other grammatical form. In speaking, the Chinese express these homophones by varying tones and gestures. In writing, their meaning is ingeniously explained by the use of two characters. One of these is a phonogram, which gives the sound of the word; the other is an ideogram or picture form, that explains which of the words having this sound is the one indicated. These ideograms are styled “keys,” and later on it will be observed are identical with the determinatives of the Assyrian and Egyptian systems. As an instance of the Chinese use of these keys, is the phonogram, _ha_. This has eight distinct significations. Thus, it may denote a banana tree, a war chariot, a scar, a cry, or any other of its various significations according to the key associated with this phonogram. Thus this language, possessing but a limited number of root words, is so expanded by the varying combinations of phonetic signs and ideographic characters, that its acquisition for reading or writing is a formidable achievement. Some of the recent dictionaries of the English language record a vocabulary of two hundred thousand words. To write any or all of these one needs only to learn the twenty-six signs of our alphabet. To write a common business letter, or to read an ordinary book in Chinese, it is necessary that the scribe or student should know familiarly from six to seven thousand of these groups of characters by which to express the forty or fifty thousand words in the vocabulary of the Chinese.