Adelung, like Sir William Jones before him, quite discredits the supposed antiquity of the Chinese Empire and the claims set up by the Chinese to a high and ancient civilization. The Great Wall, said by their historians to have been built 240 years B.C., is not mentioned by early writers, especially Marco Polo, who visited China from the West in 1270. He regards the scientific knowledge of the Chinese as inferior to that of several adjoining nations, and Confucius’s morality as nothing better than a medley of sound opinions, such as any man of strong sense might have compiled! The materials of their paper are so frail that it is impossible any of their MSS. can be very ancient, and in the fidelity or knowledge of their Transcribers he places no confidence! Finally, he views the infantine character of their language, a feature in which the Chinese are inferior to the wildest American tribes, as forming in itself a proof of the absence of a high culture, to which, he maintains, it constitutes an almost insuperable obstacle. On the other hand, unfavorable as its characteristics are to the supposed antiquity and extent of their civilization, he nevertheless considers these very peculiarities of their language in the light of decisive proofs of the high antiquity of the Chinese nation, viewed simply as a distinct branch of the human race. In the last chapter were discussed the peculiarities of structure which distinguish the Egyptian and Semetic tongues from those of the Indo-European class; peculiarities which were shown to consist, not in a fundamental difference of elements, but simply in various conventional arrangements of the same elements. This explanation will now be proved to apply also to the characteristics which distinguish the Chinese from the principal Asiatic and European languages, with this qualification however, that these characteristics, as contrasted with those of other classes of tongues, imply a separation from a parent stock at a much earlier era in the history of the human species than those which have been noticed in the last chapter, as distinguishing the Indo-European, Semetic, and Egyptian languages respectively. According to Adelung’s lucid analysis, the following are the principal steps by which language is formed. 1. The first words are vowels, or sounds produced simply by the opening of the mouth and the emission of the breath. 2. Next in order are monosyllables, consisting of a vowel and a consonant preceding, as in P-a. 3. Arise monosyllables, formed of a vowel between two or more consonants, as in P-a-p. 4. Lastly are constructed polysyllabic words, formed by a combination into one word of two or more of the monosyllabic terms.