194 Aiialj/ses of Books. [March, 



Hebrew, the Hebrew alphabet must have consisted at first of 

 only 16 letters. 



My. Wakefield's second argument is, that if alphabetical writ- 

 ina; w^is the result of human ingenuity, we might reasonably have 

 expected to hear of the invention having been made in more 

 places than one ; but this is not the case. All the alphabets at 

 present in existence may be traced either by external or internal 

 evidence to the same source. This Mr. Turner admits. All the 

 European alphabets (the Russian excepted, who got it imme- 

 diately from the Greek) may be traced to the Roman. The 

 Roman was derived from the Grecian, and the Grecian from the 

 Phoinician. The Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic alphabets are 

 referable to the same quarter. But that this fact, though curious 

 and remarkable, furnishes proof of the Divine origin of letters 

 Mr. Turner denies ; because the same thing may be said of 

 several other arts which yet have never been alledged to be of 

 Divine origin. For example, the nine digits. All Europe 

 derived them from Spain. The Spaniards got them from the 

 Moors, the Moors from the Arabians, and the Arabians from the 

 East Indies — a region in which many of the arts and sciences 

 flourished in a very remote period of antiquity. 



Mr. Wakefield's third argument is, the uniform failure of all 

 those nations who have continued for a great length of time 

 unconnected with the rest of the world \n their attempts to 

 devise any contrivance similar to the alphabetical characters, or 

 at all comparable to them in simplicity and convenience; though 

 they have made considerable proficiency in various other arts 

 and sciences. But Mr. Turner replies that the failure of the 

 Chinese in inventing an alphabet is no more surprising than that 

 such acute people and such mathematicians as the Greeks should 

 have failed in contriving numeral characters comparable to the 

 Arabic in simplicity and utility. 



Mr. Wakeheld's fourth argument is, that the transition from 

 hieroglyphics to letters, which has been commonly supposed, is 

 by no means an easy or obvious thing. This Mr. Turner admits, 

 but denies that it is any argument in favour of the Divine oiigia 

 of letters. Though they were not derived from hieroglyphics, 

 they may have been invented in another way. 



In the subsequent part of this paper, the author states his 

 objections to Mr. Wakefield's opinion, and endeavours to give 

 an idea how the discovery of letters might have been made. 



His objections are : 1. The want of necessity for such a sup- 

 position. 2. The total want of historical information on the 

 subject, which could hardly have been the case had letters been 

 derived from the immediate revelation of God. Dr. Hartley's 

 . notion that they were first conmiunicated by God in the ten 

 ; commandments cannot be true, because writing is spoken of 

 before the delivery of these commandments (Exodus, xvii. 14), 



