SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



sanctioned for many centuries ; which, as we know, it 

 still sanctions. If this form of book lacks anything of 

 perfection, no one has, as yet, pointed out a plan for 

 its betterment. 



THE TEXT OF ANCIENT BOOKS 



Thus far we have considered the book as a mechanical 

 contrivance for the reception of writing. We have now 

 to turn attention to that really essential feature, the 

 writing itself. Here, again, it is the mechanics of the 

 subject that will generally claim our attention. That is 

 to say, we shall disregard questions of philology and of 

 systems of writing, and call attention merely to certain 

 peculiarities that were common to all the different sys- 

 tems, and the fact that these may be considered as char- 

 acterizing certain peculiarities of the mental develop- 

 ment of our race. Our inquiry will have to do with such 

 practicalities of writing as the direction of the script, 

 questions of the division of words, the punctuation of 

 sentences, capitalization, and paragraphing. All of 

 which convenient accessories seem fundamentally es- 

 sential to us, but none of which was utilized by the earli- 

 est makers of books. 



An examination of any ordinary scroll of Egyptian 

 writing will show that the figures of birds, animals, and 

 men all face in one direction. In some scrolls they are 

 all turned to the right, and in others all to the left, and, 

 as a rule, the same plan holds throughout any single 

 piece of writing. The explanation of this is that the 

 Egyptian writing is always to be read from the direction 



[in] 



