Chinese is composed of about five hundred separate words, each being a monosyllable. In actual use, these five hundred root-words are multiplied to over fifteen hundred by significant variety of intonation; but the entire structure of this still living language is made up of five hundred monosyllabic words. In the opinion of most philologists we have here a survival of the root stage of language; but in the opinion of some we have the remnants of erosion, or “phonetic decay.”[166] This difference of opinion, however, is not a matter of importance to us; and therefore I will not discuss it, further than to say that on account of it I will not hereafter draw upon the Chinese language for illustrations of “radical” utterance, except in so far as philologists of all schools would allow as legitimate.[167] Hebrew has been reduced to about the same number of roots as Chinese—Renan stating it in round numbers at five hundred.[168] But without doubt this number would admit of being considerably reduced, if inquiries were sufficiently extended to the whole Semitic family. According to Professor Skeat, English is entirely made up of 461 Aryan roots, in combination with about twenty modifying constants.[169] The remote progenitor, Sanskrit, has been estimated to present as many as 850 roots, or, according to Benfey, just about twice that number.[170] On the other hand, Max Müller, as a result of more recent researches, professes to have reduced the total number of Sanskrit roots to 121.[171] It is needless to give further instances. For these are enough to show that, even if we were to regard the analytic powers of comparative philology as adequate to resolve all the compounds of a language into its primitive elements the estimate of Pott would probably be high above the mark, when he states that on an average the roots of a language may be taken at a thousand.[172] Seeing that Chinese only contains in its whole vocabulary half that number of words, and that both Hebrew and English have similarly yielded each about five hundred radicals in the crucible of more modern research, I think we may safely reduce the general estimate of Pott by one-half, and probably would be nearer the truth if we were to do so by three-quarters, or more. At all events, we may be satisfied that the total number of radicals sufficient to feed the most luxuriant of languages is expressible in three figures; and this, as we shall presently see, is enough for all the purposes of my subsequent discussion.