The characters fall into six _wen_ or classes:--1, _pictorial_, giving a picture of the thing itself; 2, _indicative_, _i.e._ designed by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest the idea in the mind of their inventor; 3, _composite_, _i.e._ made up of two characters, the meanings of which blend in the meanings of the compounds; 4, _inverted_, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy; 5, _borrowed_, _i.e._ having another meaning attached to them; 6, _phonetic_, _i.e._ one part indicating the sense and another part the sound. In Chinese phrase the ideogram is the "mother of meaning" and the phonogram the "mother of sound." The materials used largely determine the form which writing takes, and in the modern or cursive characters which are shown underneath the primitive forms we see the result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil of the Chinese scribe. Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little, because it explains itself (fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the moon as a crescent, a mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain by drops under an arch, and so forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown, such devices carry us a very little way; there is no literature possible under a mere graphic system. The third, or composite class, is the most interesting as supplying the key to the common idea of the character represented. Sometimes the characters indicate a dry humour. A "wife" is denoted by the signs for "female" and "broom," a sort of metonymy for a woman's household work; for a male child the signs "field" and "strength" are used, because he will till the soil. The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely agricultural people, and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and "a knife." The characters for "mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and "water" mean "tears"; and the verb "to listen" is indicated by an ear between two doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the "sun" and "to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality is represented by figures of the sun and moon placed side by side; a "man" and "two" stand for mankind; a couple of women stand for "strife," three for "intrigue," while a "woman under two trees" means "desire" or "covetousness." But the inadequacy of these and the other symbols to supply characters for the demands of a language in which the same sound has to stand for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose development from picture-writing more or less ideographic took place many centuries B.C. The primary symbols or combinations of vowels and consonants number about four hundred and fifty. The variations in tone in pronouncing these sounds increase the total of monosyllabic words to be understood by the ear to something over twelve hundred. But the Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thousand words, and it is the symbols for each of these which are provided by the phonetic symbols. These were compound signs, the first character, as shown above, being