fO(J ON THE tAXCtJAGES ANl) LITERATURE 



one of them expressing two cognate sounds by one 

 character, or adding a new character, or the modifica- 

 tion of a character, to express a double consonant of 

 frequent recurrence. But the Bafta character has 

 another peculiarity; it is written neither from right 

 to left, nor from left to right, nor from top to bot- 

 tom, but, in a manner directly opposite to that of 

 the Chinese, from the bottom to the top of the line, 

 as the Mexicans are said to have arranged their hiero- 

 glyphics. The material for writing is a bamboo, or 

 the branch of a tree, and the instrument for writing 

 the point of a A'm, consequently their native forests 

 always furnish them with materials in abundance, 

 and instead of our pages and volumes, they have 

 their bamboos and literary faggots. Marsden has 

 given a tolerably correct Batta alphabet, iu his his- 

 tory of Sumatra, but instead of placing the charac- 

 ters in a perpendicular line, he has arranged them 

 horizontally, which conveys an erroneous idea of 

 their natural form. The Battas, sometimes, read 

 their bamboos horizontally instead of perpendicular- 

 ly, as the Chinese and Japanese do their books, but 

 the Chinese consider the correct mode of reading to 

 be from the top to the bottom of the page, and the 

 Battas from the bottom to the top. The lines at the 

 top of a Chinese page are always regular, and if a line 

 terminates in the middle of the page, the blank space 

 is towards the bottom ; now the Battas sometimes 

 write on growing trees ; and in this case, if a blank 

 space occurs, it is towards the top of the division, a 

 circumstance which determines what they consider 

 as the natural position of their characters. The 

 Batta characters, when arranged in their proper po- 

 sition, have considerable analogy to the Bugis and 

 Tagdia. The Lampung and Rdjang characters, coin- 

 cide in power with those of the BattOy though the ar- 



