The celebrated French orientalist, Abel Remusat, who in our times has infused a new life into the study of Chinese literature, and especially thrown on the whole subject a much greater degree of clearness than originally belonged to it, has, in his examination of this first very meagre outline of the infant civilization of China, wherein he discovers the then very contracted circle of Chinese ideas, passed many intellectual observations, and drawn many historical deductions. And if, as he conjectures, the discovery of Chinese writing must date its origin from four thousand years back, this would bring it within three or four generations from the Deluge, according to the vulgar era--an estimate which certainly is not exaggerated. If this European scholar, intimately conversant as he is with Chinese antiquities and science, is at a loss adequately to describe his astonishment at the extreme poverty of these first symbols of Chinese writing, so no one, doubtless, possesses in a higher degree than himself all the necessary attainments to enable him to appreciate the immeasurable distance between this first extreme jejuneness of ideas and the boundless wealth displayed in the later, artificial and complex writing of the Chinese. But when, among other things, he calls our attention to the fact that, in this primitive writing, even the sign or symbol of a priest is wanting,--a symbol which together with the class itself must exist among the very rudest nations--I cannot concur in the truth of the remark; for he himself adduces, among other characters, one which must represent a magician. Now among the heathen nations of the primitive age, the one personage was certainly identical with the other, as even among the Cainites was very probably the case. Even the combination of several of those simple characters, which generally serves to denote the more abstract ideas, seems often, or at least originally not to have been regulated by any profound principle of symbolism, but to have arisen merely out of the vulgar perceptions or impressions of every-day life. For instance, the character denoting happiness is composed of two signs, of which one represents an open mouth, and the other a hand full of rice, or rice by itself. Here we see no allusion is made to any very lofty or chimerical idea of happiness, or to any mystic or spiritual conception of the same subject; but, as this written-character well evinces, the Chinese notion of happiness is simply represented by a mouth filled and saturated with good rice. Another example of nearly the same kind is given by Remusat with something of shyness and reserve;--the character designating woman, when doubled, signifies strife and contention, and when tripled, immoral and disorderly conduct. How widely removed are all these coarse and trivial combinations of ideas from an exquisite sense--a deep symbolism of Nature--from those spiritual emblems in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, so far as they have