104 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 



early a period^ it does not necessarily follow from such a sup- 

 position that the characters of their alphabet should be trace- 

 able, letter for letter, to Egyptian originals. The possibility of 

 one people getting the art of writing from another, without 

 taking the characters they used for particular letters, is not a 

 matter of theory, but of fact. Two systems of letters, or ra- 

 ther of characters representing syllables, have been invented 

 in modern times, by men who had got the idea of represent- 

 ing sound by written characters, fi'om seeing the books of ci- 

 vilized men, and applied it in their own way to their own lan- 

 guages. 



Some forty years ago a halfbreed Cherokee Indian, named 

 Sequoyah (otherwise George Guess), invented an ingenious 

 system of writing his language in syllabic signs, which were 

 adopted by the missionaries, and came into common use. In 

 the table given by Schoolcraft there are eighty-five such signs, 

 in great part copied or modified from those Sequoyah had 

 learnt from print ; but the letter D is to be read a ; the letter 

 M, hi ; the figure 4, se ; and so on through R, T, i. A, and 

 a number more.^ 



The syllabic system invented by a West African negro, 

 Momoru Doalu Bukere, that is to say, Mohammed Doalu the 

 Bookman, was found in use in the Vei country, about fifteen 

 years since. ^ When Europeans inquired into its origin, Doalu 

 said that the invention was revealed to him in a dream by a tall 

 venerable white man in a long coat, who said he was sent by 

 other white men to bring him a book, and who taught him 

 some characters to write words with. Doalu awoke, but never 

 learnt what the book was about. So he called his friends to- 

 gether, and one of them afterwards had another dream, in 

 which a white man appeared to him, and told him that the 

 book had come from God. It appears that Doalu, when he was 

 a boy, had really seen a white missionary, and had learnt verses 

 from the English Bible from him, so that it is pretty clear that 

 the sight of a printed book gave him the original idea which 

 he worked out into his very complete and original phonetic 



' Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 228. Bastian, vol. i. p. 423. 



- KoeUe, ' Grammar of the Vei Language ;' London, 1854, p. 229, etc. 



