Feb. 19, 1880J 



NATURE 



379 



a pair of legs should express the idea of walking, the 

 accurate drawing of the legs is no longer a matter of 

 consequence. The two lines of an angle could represent 

 the idea just as effectually as a carefully drawn pair of 

 legs. The memory and intelligence have been appealed 

 to as well as the eye, and we can as easily remember that 

 the idea of walking is denoted by two lines as by two legs. 

 Consequently we shall find that as soon as the ideographic 

 stage of writing is reached, the forms of its symbols begin 

 to degenerate. Just as the sounds of which words are 

 composed are worn away in time by phonetic decay with- 

 out any necessary impairment of their meaning, so, too, 

 the forms of characters grow changed and modified without 

 injury to their significance. It takes less trouble to 

 represent the human figure by a couple of crossed lines 

 than by an elaborate picture, and if the symbol remains 

 intelligible, the less troublesome representation inevitably 

 supersedes the older one. Pictures pass into ideographs 

 not only as regards their inner sense, but also in their 

 outward form 



The great discovery has thus been made. Ideas can 

 be rendered intelligible to the eye not by calling up 

 pictures of objects but by arbitrarily determining that a 

 particular sign shall stand for a particular idea. The 

 pictures of primitive man have become characters. It is 

 no longer the outward senses but the memory that is 

 appealed to. In short, a system of writing has been 

 invented which can be learned like a language. All that 

 now remains is to perfect the invention, to discover how 

 the whole realm of human ideas can be expressed by the 

 fewest and simplest signs. 



But the development and perfecting of the invention 

 was a slow and gradual process. When we look back 

 upon past ages it seems strange to us that the characters 

 were not at once reduced to an alphabet, the letters of 

 which denoted mere sounds. We may ask why it was 

 that men were so long in finding out that it is quite as 

 easy to symbolise sounds as to symbolise what is still 

 more impalpable, namely, ideas. What seems obvious 

 to us, however, was by no means obvious before the 

 knowledge and experience which we inherit was slowly 

 and laboriously acquired. No great discovery is ever 

 made at once, by a leap as it were. It must be prepared 

 for and led up to ; the time, as we say, must be ripe for 

 it. And the history of writing is the same as that of ail 

 other great discoveries. It was a long time before men 

 began to realise that our system of writing may be intel- 

 ligible to others even if we do not try to represent ideas 

 at all. As ideas multiplied it was found impossible to 

 find separate characters for each of them, much less to 

 remember them all. At first the difficulty was evaded by 

 combining two or more ideographs together in order to 

 express a new idea, which was analysed into others 

 already known and represented in writing. 



Thus the ancient Babylonians had separate characters 

 to denote "water" and "eye;" by combining these they 

 succeeded in suggesting to the mind of the reader the 

 notion of a "tear." So, again, as the sun was symbolised 

 by a circle, a month was readily represented by writing 

 within the circle the numeral thirty, which signified the 

 30 days of the lunar month. 



This mode of expressing ideas may be termed classi- 

 ficatory. Ideas were arranged in classes, one under the 

 other, and just as we define an idea by making it a species 

 of some other or more comprehensive idea, new ideographs 

 were formed by setting two or more side by side, one to 

 denote the genus, the other the species. Thus, as Dr. 

 Legge has shown, "a wife" is represented in the ancient 

 Chinese writing by the two ideographs of " woman" and 

 "broom," the Chinese conception of a careful housewife 

 being that of one who keeps the house clean by constant 

 sweeping. So, too, in the hieroglyphic system out of 

 which the cuneiform characters of Babylonia and Assyria 

 sprang, the ideographs of "great " and "man " stood for 



" a king," who was regarded as a special member of the 

 genus "man." The idea of "father," again, was pic- 

 turesquely expressed as "the maker of the nest," and that 

 of "prison " as " house of darkness." 



But after all there was a limit to the number of ideas 

 which could be represented ideographically. As civilisa-- 

 tion and culture progressed, pictorial writing found it 

 difficult to keep pace with the new ideas which were being 

 continually called into existence. And even if means 

 were discovered for representing them all, the burden 

 upon the memory became excessive and intolerable, a life- 

 time was required to learn a system of writing which 

 attempted to denote by separate pictures or groups of 

 pictures the manifold conceptions of civilised life. A 

 civilised people, moreover, is necessarily brought into 

 contact with its neighbours. It may try to shut itself up 

 in silent isolation, like the Egyptians of the Old Empire 

 or the Japanese of a more modern day, but sooner or 

 later the nations which surround it will force themselves 

 upon its attention, if not in the way of peace, at all events 

 by war. Then comes the question, how to express in 

 writing foreign proper names which have no meaning in 

 the language of those who would record them ? There 

 is only one answer to the question, only one solution of 

 the difficulty. We must cease trying to represent objects 

 and ideas, and must represent words, that is, sounds 

 instead. The day on which this fact dawned upon the 

 human intelligence was one of the most important in the 

 history of our race. An alphabet became possible, and 

 with it the almost unlimited power of expressing the 

 thoughts and needs of mankind. 



But it took some time yet before the possibility was 

 realised. Great discoveries, as I have before said, are 

 not made all at once ; simple as they seem when once 

 made, they must be led up to slowly and step by step. 

 An alphabet was preceded by a syllabary, that is, by a 

 system of characters each of which denoted not a single 

 sound but a syllable. It was almost inevitable that it 

 should have been so. We do not naturally divide our 

 words into individual sounds but into syllables, and a 

 syllable often stands for a word. This was especially the 

 case with the languages of the three leading inventors of 

 writing, the Chinese, the Egyptians, and the Accadian 

 population of primitive Chaldea. Many of the ideographs, 

 therefore, used by these nations represented not only ideas 

 but also single syllables, and it was obvious that they 

 might be employed to express both. In Accadian, for 

 instance, the word bat signified "to die,'' and was repre- 

 sented by a picture of a corpse; but bat also meant 

 "fortress," and so what was originally the picture of a 

 corpse came to be inserted in the picture of" an enclosure" 

 when the latter was intended to denote a fortress or 

 citadel. 



As soon as the fashion had been set of assigning to 

 characters as phonetic values their pronunciation as 

 ideographs, it rapidly spread until every character came 

 to have a purely phonetic value attached to it, as well as 

 an ideographic one. The process was, no doubt, much 

 aided by the decay and decomposition of the old pictures ; 

 it was easier to treat a character which had lost its original 

 pictorial form as a mere representative of a syllable than 

 one which still remained a faithful image of some natural 

 object. But the process was attended by one great draw- 

 back. Ideographs, as we have seen, might stand for 

 more than one idea, or the same idea might be known 

 under different names ; when, therefore, the old system 

 of ideographs was changed into a syllabary, each ideo- 

 graph represented more than one syllable. The polyphony 

 or power possessed by each character of denoting several 

 phonetic values, which resulted from this, has been a 

 great stumbling-block to the decipherers of the inscriptions 

 of Egypt and Assyria, and has only gradually been re- 

 moved. It was also a stumbling-block to the Egyptians 

 and Assyrians themselves, and various devices were 



