266 MATERIAL PROGRESS 



expressing not words, but ideas, they can be used 

 between persons who speak different languages : 

 they are understood in Pekin and in Canton 

 although the languages of these places are quite 

 dissimilar. But they are cumbrous, and unless 

 complicated by many artificial conventions 

 such as, for instance, the addition of symbols to 

 signify sounds they are hardly capable of ex- 

 pressing abstract ideas or shades of meaning. 

 The nations of the world have generally come to 

 write phonographically, that is to say, to employ 

 symbols to denote not things, or the ideas of 

 things, but the sounds by which things or ideas 

 are denoted in speech. This improvement was 

 discovered very slowly. It must have been 

 difficult for unscientific minds to conceive of the 

 reproduction of a sound by a mark or symbol, 

 and the first dawnings of the idea may have 

 arisen out of punning by the employment, for 

 instance, of the picture of a post to signify a post- 

 office. In this case the picture actually recalls 

 not an object, but a sound, and is really phono- 

 graphic. The next step would be to use pictorial 

 symbols to denote the first syllable of the name of 

 the object that they represented : thus the picture 

 of a cabin might stand for the syllable " ca." The 

 analysis of syllables into letters, and the allot- 

 ment of abbreviated symbols to individual letters 

 was the final stage of the invention. But phono- 

 graphic writing could easily be misunderstood 

 and took time to gain confidence. In the hiero- 

 glyphic inscriptions of Egypt the phonographic 

 representation of an idea is commonly followed 

 by an ideographic picture known as the " deter- 

 minant " : as a child, after scrawling the word 

 " bullock," might add, for greater clearness, a 

 picture of the animal. 



The most difficult step in the development of 



