15 
APRIL Ith, 1887. 
MICROSCOPICAL MEEHTING. 
MAY 9Qth, 1888. 
oe 
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF 
WRITTEN LANGUAGE. 
Mr. E. A. PANKHURST. 
Few perhaps of all those to whom the letters of the alphabet 
are so familiar, look upon them as the greatest achievement of the 
human intellect ; that they enshrine a history more important 
than that of any nation, and embody the culture and civilization 
of ages. 
When we endeavour to trace the development of the written 
or printed characters which we use from English to Roman, from © 
Roman to Greek, from Greek to Phenician, from Pheenician to 
Egyptian hieroglyphics, and from these to the earliest efforts of man 
in fashioning signs for his spoken language, there are some blank 
pages in the earlier record due to the ravages of time. These 
_ must be supplied from the known efforts of savage, or semi-savage 
tribes, still in existence, to translate their thoughts into characters: 
_ Among the North American Indians, when they were first brought 
_ into contact with Europeans a method of picture-writing prevailed 
of which many ingenious specimens are preserved ; rude pictures 
representing men as warriors, the signs of the tribes to which 
_ they belonged, and the places near which they fought. But even 
in these a picture of the sun not only stands for the sun, but for 
 aday. The figure of the heart stands for “desire” and so on. 
_ Some progress has evidently been made. For between the mere 
_ representation of things to that of moral qualities the chasm is 
. 4 immense and must have taken centuries to bridge over. In the 
_ earlier Chinese characters the figure of an ear at a door stands for 
