114 EVOLUTION 



satisfactory; while a large number of languages and 

 dialects defy the comparative philologists. Nor is there 

 much greater agreement in theories of the origin of 

 speech generally. It is merely generally felt that 

 language was gradually evolved when Paleolithic men 

 came to live in social groups, by a slow process of 

 attaching a definite and conventional meaning to sounds 

 that were at first natural and spontaneous. 



Of the growth of written language we have somewhat 

 better traces, as it falls later. No one now doubts that 

 it began with the depicting of objects, as in the old 

 Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphs. In Chinese each 

 word is a root, and is expressed by one character. 

 Comparing the most ancient with the modern, we find 

 that the character was originally a picture or symbol of 

 the object. Egyption hieroglyphs are obvious pictures, 

 and here we seem to find the picture degenerating into a 

 phonetic element, and coming to stand for the first part 

 of the sound (the first " letter ") in the name of the 

 object. Babylonian cuneiform characters show a similar 

 degeneration to the Chinese, from rough pictures made 

 with the chisel in the clay to conventional signs. Much 

 labour has been expended in tracing the European 

 alphabet to the older hieroglyphs, but we must leave the 

 subject to special treatises. 



