438 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. II., No. 34. 



the American savage? " Speaking for myself, I would 

 suggest that his questiou contains its answer. My 

 discoveries have established the glacial age of man on 

 the Atlantic seaboard of America, and. at that time 

 his culture was that stage known as ' paleolithic' 

 Chas. C. Abbott, M.D. 



Trenton, N.J., Sept. IS, 1883. 



THE ALPHABET. 



The alphabet, an account of the origin and develop- 

 ment of letters. By Isaac Tayloe, M.A., LL.D. 

 2 vols. London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Sf Co., 

 1883. 16 + 358; 398 p. 8°. 

 Mr. Taylor has produced an admirable 

 ■work on the interesting subject of alphabetic 

 writing. It abounds in wealth of collected 

 material, down to the verj' latest discoveries 

 (some of them of the utmost importance). 

 By la^^sh and well-chosen illustration it puts 

 this material before the apprehension of the 

 reader or student with the most desirable clear- 

 ness ; and its digest and criticism of former 

 opinious is made with impartialitj' and inde- 

 pendence of judgment, while the author adds 

 abundantljr of new views, and arguments to 

 support them. No other existing work of a 

 like character can bear any comparison with 

 it ; and it deserves to have, as it doubtless will 

 attain, a wide circulation and popularity. 



In the main, these volumes are filled with 

 the histor3^ of our own alphabet and its rela- 

 tives, or of the ancient Phoenician with its de- 

 scendants and probable ancestor, since other 

 systems of alphabetic writing are compar- 

 atively insignificant in number and in im- 

 jDortance. The Chinese characters are not 

 alphabetic, although one or two derivatives 

 from them (as the Japanese kata-kana) have 

 that character. The cuneiform mode of writ- 

 ing ended its career in an alphabetic S3'stem, 

 the Persian ; but all the peoples using cunei- 

 form passed over, more than two thousand 

 years ago, to the side of the Phoenician. There 

 have been other hierogij-phic schemes, in the 

 old world and the new, that made advances, 

 no one can s&y just how far, toward alphabet- 

 ism ; but thej' are long since perished 'without 

 descendants. All thi^e, together with such 

 theoretic basis as he chooses to lay for the sci- 

 ence, Mr. Taj'lor despatches in the first chap- 

 ter (seventy pages) of his first volume ;" the 

 rest is devoted to our alphabet : the various 

 kindred Semitic forms of it being treated in 

 the former volume, and the Indo-European 

 forms, with the few outside stragglers, in the 

 latter, under the divisions of Greek, deriva- 

 tives of Greek (Italian, Coptic, Slavonic, 

 Albanian, Runic, Ogham), Iranian, and In- 

 dian. The method is not to be condemned, 



although we might have desired a more ample 

 theoretical introduction. The fundamental 

 principle of alphabetic history is distinct, and 

 briefl}' statable : all writing begins necessarilj- 

 with the depiction of scenes and objects, or is- 

 purelj' pictorial ; it e^■erywhere tends to pass 

 over into a depiction of the names of objects ; 

 and, when it has fully reached that condition, 

 it has become alphabetic. There can be no 

 such thing as an alphabet not starting from a 

 pictorial stage, anj' more than a spoken lan- 

 guage without an initial imitative root-stage. 

 But while in language we can only get back 

 bj' inference to such a state of things, because 

 the beginnings of language are so remote from 

 us, in writing we find the pictorial stage abun- 

 dantly represented. 



Whether that stage is discoverable in the 

 actual historj^ of our own alphabet, is a ques- 

 tion not yet absolutelj' settled. Every step 

 hy which our familiar letters go back to the 

 primitive Semitic alphabet, usually called bj- 

 us Phoenician, is traced out with the utmost 

 distinctness. The Phoenician is purely, though 

 defectivelj-, alphabetic. It must, then, have 

 come from a pictorial original. Three such 

 sj'stems of writing are found in its neighbor- 

 hood, — Egyptian, cuneiform (the perhaps suf- 

 ficient, though rather scanty, evidences of 

 whose hieroglyphic origin are given hy our 

 author) , and the recently discovered and still 

 obscure Hittite. Did it come demonstrabh^ 

 from one of these, or has it an ancestor now 

 lost to us? As is well known, De Rough's 

 work, published less than ten j-ears ago, at- 

 tempted to show its derivation from Egyptian, 

 from hieratic characters, of known hieroglyphic 

 originals ; and his view is widelj", though by 

 no means universally, accepted. Mr. Taylor 

 is a firm believer in it, and sets it forth with 

 much clearness and force. We find ourselves 

 unable fully to share his conviction. De 

 Rouge endeavored to prove more than was 

 reasonable, and found it so easj- to prove all 

 he undertook, that his verj' success casts a 

 shade of unreality over the whole comparison. 

 We maj' allow that his identifications are both 

 possible, and, as a whole, plausible quite be- 

 yond any others j'et made. Yet whereas the 

 derivation of the Greek or of the Arabic 

 alphabet, for example, is past all doubt, and 

 he would rightly be passed by as a time-waster 

 who should attempt to re-open the question, no 

 reproach can attach to the scholar who, uncon- 

 vinced bv De Rouged, should ivy to find an- 

 other and better solution of the problem, as 

 some are actuallj- doing. Mr. Taylor over- 

 states the desirableness of acquiescing in the 



