The system permits, moreover, of the easy arrangement of indecipherable private codes, because by adding or subtracting a certain number from each group of figures, other characters than those telegraphed can be indicated.
I need hardly add that the system of wood blocks is not in practical use, for the numbers and their characters are now printed in code-books.
And here we have an instance of the marvellous faculty of memorising characteristic of the Chinese.

A Chinaman's memory is something prodigious.

From time immemorial the memory of the Chinese has been developed above all the other faculties.

Memory is the secret of success in China, not originality.

Among a people taught to associate innovation with impiety, and with whom precedent determines all action, it is inevitable that the faculty of recollection should be the most highly developed of all the mental faculties.