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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



own time, and will recognize his friend's writ- 

 ing at a glance, as he recognizes his face ; he 

 has more difficulty in discriminating between 

 the individual handwritings of a foreign coun- 

 try. Set before him specimens of the writing 

 of the last century, and he will confuse the 

 hands of difPerent persons. Take him still 

 further, and he will pronounce the writing of 

 a whole school to be the writing of one man ; 

 and he will see no difference between the 

 hands, for instance, of an Englishman, a 

 Frenchman, and a Fleming. Still further 

 back the writing of one century is to him the 

 same as the writing of another, and he may 

 fail to name the locality where a manuscript 

 was written by the breadth of a whole con- 

 tinent." In the ancient Greek texts, with 

 which palaeography has largely to do, how- 

 ever remote the date of the documents which 

 we are studying, Mr. Thompson observes, 

 the impression is produced that all sorts 

 of men wrote as fluently then as they do 

 now. If, then, we find such evenly dis- 

 tributed facility in writing so far back, we 

 must infer that the art was developed among 

 the Greeks, or picked up by them from some 

 other people very far back. In the earliest 

 Greek inscriptions the writing was in the 

 Semitic style, from right to left. This was 

 superseded by the boustrophedon style, which 

 read from right to left and left to right, in 

 alternate lines ; and that gave way to the 

 present style. Many valuable Greek codices 

 have recently been found. The pasteboards 

 of the coffins discovered by Mr. Petrie at 

 Gurob, in the Fayouni, Egypt, have furnished 

 many. They are composed of papyri pasted 

 together, which, being carefully separated, 

 have been found to contain manuscripts of the 

 third century b. c, the oldest specimens of 

 Greek writing we have. Thus have been 

 recovered fragments of Plato's Phaedo, the 

 lost play Antiope of Euripides, and Aris- 

 totle's Constitution of Athens, which was 

 written on the back of an account roll of a 

 farm bailiff in Ilermopolis, a. d. 78-79. 

 These finds are encouraging to a more sys- 

 tematic search of the Egyptian depositories. 

 Of medi.TCval styles, no school developed the 

 purely ornamental side of calligraphy so 

 thoroughly and rapidly as the Irish. The 

 finest manuscript of the style is the Book of 

 Kells, now at Trinity College, Dublin. Eng- 

 land is chiefly indebted to Ireland for its 



style, while the styles of the Roman school 

 of missionaries were " foreign," and never 

 became fully naturalized. The round hand 

 was chiefly used for books and charters, 

 while the pointed hand, though also employed 

 for books, was most frequent in documents. 

 These hands gradually suffered changes and 

 degeneration, were affected and partly dis- 

 placed by the French minuscule, and hence 

 gradually became differentiated into the mul- 

 titude of nondescripts that now pass for 

 EngUsh handwriting. 



The Grand Falls of Labrador, An ac- 

 count of his visit to the Grand Falls of Lab- 

 rador has been- given by Henry G. Bryant, of 

 Philadelphia, in the Century Magazine and in 

 a Bulletin of the Geographical Club of Phila- 

 delphia. They are situated on the Grand or 

 Hamilton River, which rises in the lakes of 

 the upland region of the peninsula and flows 

 in a general southeasterly direction into 

 Hamilton Inlet the great arm of the sea 

 which, under various names, penetrates into 

 the interior a distance of one hundred and 

 fifty miles. No scientific explorer has ad- 

 vanced far into the country, and all that is 

 known of it is derived from vague informa- 

 tion furnished by Indians, a few missiona- 

 ries, and the Hudson Bay Company's men. 

 The first white man to visit and describe the 

 falls was John McLean, of the Hudson Bay 

 Company, in 1839. They were visited twen- 

 ty years afterward by Joseph McPherson. 

 These are the only white men who are known 

 to have seen the Grand Falls till the sum- 

 mer of 1891, when Mr. Bryant and ian expe- 

 dition from Bowdoin College reached them 

 independently of one another. Mr. Bryant, 

 accompanied by Prof. C. A. Kenaston, of 

 Washington, and a Scotch and an Indian as- 

 sistant, left Northwest River Post, at the 

 head of Hamilton Bay, on August 3d, to pro- 

 ceed up the stream by canoe. On the 27th 

 they reached the point where the further 

 navigation of the stream is obstructed by 

 rapids, whence they proceeded overland and 

 reached the falls September 2d. " A single 

 glance showed that we had before us one of 

 the greatest waterfalls in the world. ... A 

 mile above the main leap the river is a noble 

 stream four hundred yards wide, already 

 flowing at an accelerated speed. Four rapids, 

 marking successive depressions in the river 



