Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group: Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship. They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's existence. They suppose they are akin--through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then. Their kinship consists in this: the words are each are billiard-balls--and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes. Thus I should call a Tibetan name like _nGamri-srong-btsan_ a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like _T'ang Tai-tsong_ a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know.--The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say 'the horse kicked the man,' _horse agent man kicking completion,_ or words to that effect,--dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words for _horse_ and _man,_ in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as _geegee_ and _equus,_ and _Smith_ and _Jones._ As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._ One says: "Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other, "The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness." In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, _shih,_ pronounced like the first three letters in the word _shirt_ in English. That vocable may mean: _history,_ or _to employ,_ or _a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house,_ and all such things as that;--I mention a few out of the list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus _Ts'in_ meant one country, and _Tsin_ another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You pronounce _shih_ one tone--you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means _poetry;_ you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes _a