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Pictographic Reconnaissances. Part IX and Index

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Extract

All things must come to an end, and this series of papers, now running for ten years, is herewith concluded. This final instalment consists of an index, enabling a reader to find at once any character discussed in the series, with the year of the Journal and the page in the latter where the character appears. Naturally the years cannot pass without disclosing much that could be added or improved or qualified. But remembering that he who begins by revising may end by rewriting, I have left these studies as they were published in the Journal.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1928

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References

page 327 note 1 See Karlgren, , Analytic Dictionary of Chinese, p 82Google Scholar.

page 328 note 1

page 328 note 1 Otherwise and more simply expressed, there were two words lung and i for one creature.

page 328 note 1 Thus at the opening of the I King or Book of Changes we find ch'ien lung “the concealed Dragon”, and hsien lung tsai t'ien “the Dragon appears in the fields”.

page 330 note 1 I do not quite see on what Takata bases this statement. The Shuo Wen contains both characters, but under neither does it make nor, so far as I can see, imply such an assertion.

page 330 note 1 This quaint fairy story should be read in its entirety in Chavannes' French rendering in his Mémoires historiques, vol. i, p. 282, from which I quote part of his note 4. “Pourquoi les femmes étaient-elles nues ? c'était peut-être afin que l'écume surnaturelle entrât dans l'une d'elles et que le prodige fût ainsi exorcisé; l'hypothése est plausible puisque nous voyons que c'est cette écume, transformée en lézard, qui produit la grossesse de la petite fille du sérail. Cette écume semble avoir été le liquide spermatique des dragons.” In rendering into English the Chinese passage above cited I have preferred to use the term saurian instead of Chavannes' word lézard, for what the Shuo Wen says, under yüan, that it utters its call through the snout, though applicable to the alligator or other large Saurian, is not so to lizards, small creatures like the house-lizard, the gecko, and the chameleon, which do not possess snouts, nor utter sounds. May I mention here that no species of chameleon is found in China.