THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONTINUED. 359 



On passing from spoken to written language, we come 

 upon several classes of facts, all having similar implications. 

 Written language is connate with Painting and Sculpture; 

 and at first all three are appendages of Architecture, and 

 have a direct connexion with the primary form of all Gov- 

 ernment — the theocratic. Merely noting by the way the 

 fact that sundry wild races, as for example the Australians 

 and the tribes of South Africa, are given to depicting per- 

 sonages and events upon the walls of caves, which are proba- 

 bly regarded as sacred places, let us pass to the case of the 

 Egyptians. Among them, as also among the Assyrians, we 

 find mural paintings used to decorate the temple of the god 

 and the palace of the king (which were, indeed, originally 

 identical) ; and as such they were governmental appliances 

 in the same sense that state-pageants and religious feasts 

 were. Further, they were governmental appliances in vir- 

 tue of representing the worship of the god, the triumphs of 

 the god-king, the submission of his subjects, and the punish- 

 ment of the rebellious. And yet again they were govern- 

 mental, as being the products of an art reverenced by the 

 people as a sacred mystery. From the habitual use 



of this pictorial representation, there naturally grew up the 

 but slightly-modified practice of picture-writing — a prac- 

 tice which was found still extant among the Mexicans at the 

 time they were discovered. By abbreviations analogous to 

 those still going on in our own written and spoken language, 

 the most familiar of these pictured figures were successively 

 simplified; and ultimately there grew up a system of sym- 

 bols, most of which had but a distant resemblance to the 

 things for which they stood. The inference that the hiero- 

 glyphics of the Egyptians were thus produced, is confirmed 

 by the fact that the picture-writing of the Mexicans was 

 found to have given birth to a like family of ideographic 

 forms; and among them, as among the Egyptians, these had 

 been partially differentiated into the kuriologieal or imita- 

 tive, and the tropical or symbolic : which were, however, 



