June 7, iSSS] 



NA TURE 



123 



The Semites received the hieroglyphics from their inven- 

 tors after they had already assumed a cuneatic form, and 

 added still further to the heritage. When the Semitic 

 king Sargon I. was reigning in Babylonia in B.C. 3800, 

 the scribes at his court were still occupied in devising new 

 forms of characters, and in increasing the number of phon- 

 etic values the student was required to learn. This is the 

 cause of the fact pointed out by Prof, de Lacouperie, that, 

 whereas most of the cuneiform characters have to be 

 turned on their sides in order to be restored to their 

 primitive position (Chaldaean writing having once been 

 traced [in vertical columns), there are other characters 

 which have never been thus displaced. As time went on, 

 the forms of the characters became more and more dis- 

 torted ; the number of persons in Babylonia who could 

 read and write was very large, and while the general form 

 of script varied from age to age, the individual in each 

 age was distinguished by a peculiar form of handwriting 

 as much as is the individual of to-day. An official scrip- 

 never prevailed in Babylonia as it did in Assyria, where 

 education was practically confined to the class of scribes ; 

 and while, therefore, the Assyrian student has little need 

 of learning more than one form of writing as long as he 

 confines himself to the monuments of Assyria, he is 

 bewildered by the number of cursive hands which the 

 documents of Babylonia oblige him to decipher. 



The oldest Babylonian monuments yet known are those 

 discovered by the French Consul M. de Sarzec at Telloh 

 in Southern Babylonia. They are earlier than the epoch 

 of Sargon I., and belong to the pre-Semitic era. The 

 inscriptions engraved upon them still preserve in some 

 measure the old vertical arrangement of the characters, 

 and in some few cases the characters themselves have a 

 pictorial form. But more generally they have already 

 become cuneatic, and not unfrequently have departed so 

 widely from their primitive appearance as to make it im- 

 possible even to guess what they were primarily intended 

 to represent. If this were the case in the fourth millen- 

 nium before our era, we may have some idea of the vast 

 antiquity to which the beginnings of Babylonian writing 

 must reach back. 



In other instances, though the transformation of the 

 character is not so complete, it is difficult to determine 

 with certainty the object originally portrayed. Some of 

 Prof, de Lacouperie's examples are in this plight, and as 

 regards at least two of them — those pronounced da and 

 du or tur — I prefer the explanations suggested by Mr. 

 Pinches and Mr. Bertin to those suggested by himself. 

 In fact, in tjje first case he has misinterpreted, like the 

 earlier Assyriologists, the Assyrian explanation of the 

 ideograph nasa sa nisi j which signifies, not "the summit 

 of man," but " the lifting up of a man." It is consequently 

 natural to regard it as representing the uplifted arm. 



Prof, de Lacouperie rejects the theory which saw in the 

 mountains of Elam the birth-place of Babylonian writing. 

 Whatever, however, may be the value of the arguments 

 urged by the advocates of this theory, the arguments 

 brought against it by Prof, de Lacouperie do not appear 

 to me to be cogent. Certainly it is not my experience 

 that the coast of a flat country like Chakkea " always looks 

 mountainous " to the seafarer ; while the Accadian word a 

 (misprinted at) signifies "father," not because of the 

 ideographic meaning of the character which represented 



it, but because the Accadian ada, " father," became in 

 pronunciation, through phonetic decay, first ad, and then a. 

 The symbol of " country " attached to the ideographs of 

 " man " or " servant," " handmaid " and " wild ox," need 

 not have been introduced before the Accadians had long 

 been settled in the Babylonian plain, and it is not quite 

 correct to say that " while [Babylonian writing] possesses 

 primitive symbols for ' boat ' and for ' wind,' represented 

 by an inflated sail, there are none for 'river.'" Both 

 "ship" and "river" are alike denoted by a double 

 ideograph. 



The question, however, whether the cuneiform system 

 of writing originated in "the mountains of the East," as 

 the Babylonians called them, or in the islands of the Persian 

 Gulf, does not affect Prof, de Lacouperie's main contention. 

 If this can be established, a new and important chapter 

 will be opened in the history of the ancient East, and the 

 mystery which has so long enveloped the origin of the 

 Celestial Empire will be cleared away. I must leave it to 

 the Sinologists to determine whether, on the Chinese side, 

 Prof, de Lacouperie's conclusions are sustainable ; on the 

 Babylonian side, he has nothing to fear from Assyrian 

 scholars. A. H. Sayce. 



DR. EIMER ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 



Die Entstehutig der Arten auf Grimd von Vererben 

 erworbener Eigenschaften nack den Gesetzen organ- 

 ischen Wachsens. Von Dr. G. H. Theodor Eimer, 

 Professor der Zoologie und vergleichenden Anatomie 

 zu Tubingen. (Jena: Gustaf Fischer, 1888.) 



IT is a little curious that, although Darwin was so much 

 more an experimenter than an anatomist, the im- 

 mediate stimulus of his work was to anatomy, and not to 

 experiment. There is, however, ample evidence that 

 morphologyisbeginningto advance on the lines prophesied 

 for it at the end of the " Origin of Species," and that 

 morphologists are to enter the " almost untrodden field 

 of inquiry on the causes and laws of variation, on correla- 

 tion, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action 

 of external conditions." 



Dr. Eimer's book is written from the stand-point of one 

 who believes that there is more to be made out of the 

 study of the influence of the environment on a single set 

 of organisms than of the anatomy and microscopy of 

 many organisms. It is an abundant storehouse of facts, 

 old and new, about the influence of the physical environ- 

 ment. Many curious problems are dealt with, and the 

 infinite fertility of the field of investigation is shown. But 

 the book claims to be far more than this : it claims to 

 supply a new theory of the organic world — a theory in 

 which natural selection plays only a casual and incidental 

 part. 



Dr. Eimer starts from the premiss that natural selection 

 is insufficient to account for the evolution* of the organic 

 world because it is essentially the rule of chance. One 

 had thought that this misconception had, even in the con- 

 troversy of the ignorant, long ago died of inanition. Not 

 only is the whole tenour of Darwin's book opposed to 

 such a conception, but Darwin has specifically guarded 

 against it. For him and for his theory " chance " is but a 

 convenient way of denominating processes of whose 



