82 The Rev. Dr. Wall on the Nature, Age, and Origin of the 



nature of the characters of his system would at once point out the mode of 

 effecting their decomposition to one who was already acquainted with the decom- 

 position of their powers. Nothing, then, could be more easy to him than the 

 rising from his syllabary to a superior alphabet ; and it is absurd to suppose that 

 he would not avail himself of the advantage of this alphabet which was so com- 

 pletely within his reach. Hence, in spite of all former evidence, and in spite of 

 present appearances, it would, from such reasoning, necessarily follow, that the 

 Abyssinian really used the elements of his graphic system as consonants and 

 vowels. To this extraordinary conclusion at all events M. Abel-Remusat actually 

 came, whether the train of thoughts which led him to it was exactly that which 

 I have described, or one in any respect different. Now, as I apprehend, the 

 safest mode of proceeding is to commence with what may be known to a cer- 

 tainty, not merely through the concurrent evidence of great numbers of men 

 eminent for learning and ability, but also by our own observation. The letters 

 belonging to the text of the Ethiopic Bible are, to a certainty, and beyond all 

 question, therein employed with syllabic powers. The Abyssinian, therefore, did 

 not know how to make out of his system a superior alphabet ; and, consequently 

 he could not have had any clear conception of a consonant. 



From the fact which has been just established, it follows that the Abyssinian 

 did not, by means of his own penetration and sagacity, acquire the conception of 

 vowels which enabled him to make the classification, exhibited in the table of his 

 system, of the syllabic powers that he referred to each letter. For he could not, 

 by any analysis of the articulate sounds expressed by those letters, have arrived at 

 vowels without reaching, by the same process, to consonantal powers. The addi- 

 tion, therefore, to his alphabet of all the columns after the first, — by means of 

 which his syllables are, in reference to their vocal ingredients, methodically 

 arranged and definitely expressed, — must have been derived by him from some 

 external source. But he could not have taken the hint which guided him in this 

 matter from observation of any of the other Shemitic systems ; as the several 

 modes of pointing them did not commence till long after ; and if he had first met 

 with the older vocalization that is common in kind, though not in quantity, to all 

 those systems, he would, it is plain from analogy, have adopted it, in like manner 

 as all others placed in the same circumstances had done, however he might have 

 subsequently differed from them in his mode of supplying the defects of that 



