WRITING PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 623 



using a brush which is manipulated slowly and makes a thick stroke, 

 and follow the order of arrangement of their mural pictures. Their 

 temples are made of wood, and it is the posts that are ornamented, 

 naturally from the top down. This direction is also most convenient 

 in all j^ainting, since it corresponds with the natural movements of the 

 joints of the fingers. 



The Shemitic |>eoples the Bedouins of the desert, Arabs, Turks, 

 and Mohammedan negroes write squatting on the carpet, or some- 

 times standing ; the right hand, holding the pen, hangs free from the 

 arm over the paper, and the arm is not supported. The left hand, also 

 free in the air, or supported on the raised left knee, holds the paper 

 stiff or laid on a little board. The right hand stays unmoved in the 

 same place ; only the fingers are put in motion for the shaping of the 

 letters ; while the left hand continually pushes the paper from left to 

 right, so that the letters assume an arrangement from right to left, or 

 in a centripetal direction. Thus the Shemitic j)eople in writing per- 

 form movements directly opposed to ours. We hold the jDaper still, 

 and move the hand ; they move the paper, and hold the right hand 

 almost still, as the Koran orders them to do. 



An alphabet of two hundred phonetic signs representing syllables 

 was invented in 1832, by a negro of the Yei tribe, who had learned to 

 read from a missionary. He taught his j^eople to write with a reed- 

 pen and ink ; but, while he wrote from left to right, the whole nation 

 to-day write from right to left. If^ as some believe, our centrifugal 

 system of writing from left to right is founded on physiological con- 

 siderations, the Yeis would not have departed from it after having 

 been taught in it. 



M. Erlenmeyer accounts for the direction of the Shemitic writing 

 on the supposition of its having been originally centrifugal, by assum- 

 ing that these people first wrote with the left hand, to which the direc- 

 tion of their writing would be centrifugal, and afterward changed the 

 hand without changing the direction of the wi'iting. This is exceed- 

 ingly improbable, for the Shemitic races consider the left hand impure, 

 and regard writing as a holy act, which they never could have thought 

 of performing with an impure instrument. Another explanation must 

 be sought. 



Holy acts, with the Shemitic peoples, are performed looking toward 

 the east ; therefore, in writing, those people would turn their faces to 

 the east. The light would then come from the south, and the scribe 

 would write from the light toward the shadow, from the unrolled part 

 of his paper toward the roll which he is continually unrolling with his 

 left hand. If he wished to write from left to right, he would require to 

 have the roll in his right hand, and, in that case, the thicker the roll the 

 more it would cut off his light and be in his way. The centripetal di- 

 rection, from right to left, was then for the primitive Shemitic peoples, 

 and still is for the Orientals, the only natural direction ; it is founded 



