128 EULOGY ON THOMAS YOUNG. 



sented to liim, without the need of knowing a single word of the lan- 

 guage spoken by tlie authors Avho i.ave written them. 

 It is not so with alphabetical writing. 



" He who first taiiglit ns the injcenious art 



To paiut our words, and speak them to our eyes," 



having made the capital remark that all words of a spoken language, 

 even tlie most rich, are compounded of a very limited number of 

 elementary articulate sounds, invented artiticial signs or letters to the 

 number of twenty-four or thirty to represent them. By the aid of these 

 signs diflerently combined he could write every w^ord which struck his 

 ear, even without knowing the meaning of it. 



The Chinese or hieroglyphic writing seems to be the infancy of the 

 art. It is not always, as has been sometimes said, that to learn to read 

 it, even in China, occupies the whole life of a studious Mandarin. Ee- 

 musat (whose name I cannot mention without recalling one of the most 

 heavj^ losses which literature has lately sustained) has established, both 

 by his own experience and by the fact of the excellent scholars he has 

 formed every year by his lectures, that we may learn Chinese like any 

 other language. It is not true, as was once imagined, that the char- 

 acters are apj)ropriated solely to the expression of common ideas ; several 

 pages of the romance of Yu-Mao-li., or The Two Cousins, will suffice to 

 show that the most subtle abstractions, the quintessence of refinements, 

 are not beyond the range of the Chinese writing. The chief fault of this 

 mode of writing is, that it gives no means of expressing new names. A 

 letter from Canton might have told at Pekin that on the 14th of June, 

 1800, a great and memorable battle saved France from great peril ; but 

 it would not have been able to express in these purelj^ hieroglyphic char- 

 acters that this glorious e^ent took place near the village of Marengo, 

 or that the victorious general was called Bonaparte. A people among 

 whom the communication of proper names, from one place to another, 

 could only take place by means of special messengers, would be, as we 

 see, only in the first rudiments of civilization. Tliese preliminary re- 

 marks are not useless. The question of priority, which the graphic 

 methods of Egypt have called forth, thus comes to be easy to explain and 

 to comprehend. As we proceed, in fact, we find in the hieroglyphics of 

 the ancient people of the Pharoahs all the artifices of which the Chinese 

 make use at the present day. 



Many passages of Herodotus, of Diodorus Siculus, of Clement of Al- 

 exandria, have taught us that tlie Egyptians had two or three different 

 sorts of writing, and that in one of these, at least, symbolic characters, 

 or the representatives of ideas, played a principal part. Horapollon 

 has even preserved to us the signification of a certain number of these 

 characters. Thus we know that the liawlc designated the soul^ the ihis^ 

 the heart; the dove, (which might seem strange,) a violent man; the 

 flute, nn alien; the nnmher six, x)Icasure ; i\ frog, aw impudent man; the 

 ant, wisdom; a, running Icnot, love ; &c. 



The signs thus preserved by Horapollon form only a very small part 

 of the eight or nine hundred characters which have been found in the 

 ancient inscriptions. The moderns, Kircher among others, have en- 

 deavored to enlarge the number. Their efforts have not given any use- 

 ful result, unless it be so to show to what errors even the best-instructed 

 men "expose themselves when in the search after facts they abandon 

 themselves without restraint to imagination. In the want of data, the 

 interpretation of the Egyptian writings appeared for a long time, to all 

 sound minds, a problem completely incapable of solution, when, in 1799, 

 M. Boussard, an engineer ofiicer, discovered in the excavations which 



