244 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



bones and reindeer horns decorated with designs and sculpt- 

 ures, which sometimes represented veritable scenes. These de- 

 signs, besides being mnemonic aids, are capable of transmitting 

 thought as well as of preserving it. The day that these pictures 

 were changed into recitals, man was ready to write. A scene en- 

 graved on a rock at Skebbevall, in Sweden, helps us to witness a 

 landing of adventurers and their establishment in the country. 

 Beside scenes of pursuit and piracy, are files of boats which we 

 can count, with the braves aboard of them. Disks and groups of 

 points above the scene indicate the time of the year or of the moon 

 when it took place. Here the design is only in outline. Most of 

 the boats are represented by two concentric curved lines, diversi- 

 fied with slight parallel strokes representing the braves. From 

 this time the figure, abridged and truncated, is transformed into 

 a sign, and that is a mark of writing. Man after this manifested 

 that power of abstraction which is his privilege, and which con- 

 sists in holding to that which is essential in things, and suppress- 

 ing the rest. Man is, perhaps, the cousin of the monkey ; but a 

 chimpanzee will never be anything but a novice in abstraction, 

 and that is why he will never take it into his head to speak or 

 write. 



Writing, as M. Berger says, is the art of fixing speech by con- 

 ventional signs, traced with the hand, which are called charac- 

 ters. These characters may represent ideas or spoken sounds. 

 That writing which aims to represent ideas directly is called 

 ideographic, and the characters it employs are figurative. Some 

 hieroglyphics are shortened images in which we can recognize, 

 without too much effort, the sun, the moon, a mountain, a snake, 

 a flower, a shoe, or a mirror. Then we deal with abstract ideas, we 

 have recourse to symbols. A man kneeling, with his hands raised, 

 conveys the idea of adoration ; a hanging lamp, that of night ; 

 an open eye signifies vigilance and knowledge ; an ostrich feather 

 gives the idea of justice, because the wing feathers of that bird 

 are all equal. The characters of phonetic writing, on the con- 

 trary, represent, not objects but the sounds composing the words 

 that stand for those objects ; and the writing is called syllabic or 

 alphabetical accordingly as the characters express complex articu- 

 lations or simple sounds, syllables or letters. 



This distinction between the two methods is only theoretically 

 correct. In reality nearly all systems of writing have, by a curi- 

 ous fatality, sooner or later come to syllabism. This occurred in 

 the five great ideographic systems of the ancient world — the Chi- 

 nese, the cuneiform writing of Assyria, Media, and Persia, and the 

 Egyptian hieroglyphics. Egypt did not stop there, but pushed the 

 analysis of the elements of speech still further, and, having disen- 

 gaged the syllable, then disengaged the letter ; and from the sixth 



