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35.
[[underline]] CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM. [/underline]]
     From the European scholars,- particularly those in France and the French school at Hanoi,- I received encouragement for my plan for the gradual formation of a [[underline]] corpus [[/underline]] of Chinese inscriptions, with a view to its publication.  The thousands of rubbings from stone tablets at present to be secured should be catalogued under period and locality and be made available to the student. By degrees the field workers should, on their travels, collect other photographs and rubbings which would be added to the collection. Most valuable of all for the purposes of quick accumulation of material of this sort would be the missionaries. When put in touch with the School and told of its aims and needs, they will be able to contribute rubbings from all parts of China. 
     As the French school at Hanoi has already made a valuable start in this matter, I suggested to them that our institution would send them what we collect in order to have a central point for the [[underline]] "corpus." [[/underline]] When a sufficient number of important rubbings of stone inscriptions had been collected, these untranslated texts could be published, with the addition perhaps of photographs, and all available notes on the exact location, measurements, related monuments, local traditions bearing on the history, or extracts from historical books which would be illuminating. In this way the world would not be forced to wait for the laborious work of complete translation and elucidation, but every Chinese scholar might have at his elbow a large number of texts of inscriptions divided chronologically,- a volume of Han, one of the Six Dynasties, etc., etc.