252 Editors Table. { March, 
EDITORS’ TABLE. 
EDITORS: A. S. PACKARD AND E. D. COPE. 
The principles which underlie the doctrine of evolution 
are the unity of organization and the derivation of modern types 
of beings from a primitive germ. While the theory of descent 
has rehabilitated philosophy, the leading historians, such as 
Greene, Freeman and others, have studied and are studying his- 
tory in the inductive method, and, like the evolutional naturalist 
or philosopher, or social scientist, go back to the beginning of 
things historical, detecting, for example, in the early stages of 
German culture the germs of our democratic system of represent- 
ation and self-government. 
Another set of workmen, the philologists, have long and inde- 
pendently, perhaps, of any influence from naturalists, adopted the 
methods of the palzontologists and discovered a primitive Aryan 
prototype of certain of our more modern as well as so-called 
ancient dialects; and now come the students of the world’s alpha- 
bets, notably Dr. Taylor and Professor A. H. Sayce, who avow- 
edly confess their inability to work out lasting results without 
having recourse to modern scientific methods, particularly the 
doctrine of evolution from a primitive germ. 
It appears that the world’s alphabets are “all but the manifest 
developments of a single germ.” That germ was the hiero- 
glyphics of Egypt, the running form of which was the selected 
characters of the Egyptian hieratics. These were adopted by 
the Phcenicians, who carried them to Greece. The Greek alpha- 
bet took its Hellenic shape by the addition of four new charac- 
ters (p, z, ¢ and v), probably, Mr. Sayce claims, derived from the 
Hittites. Finally a great variety of alphabets belonging to dif- 
ferent ages and localities arose, and it was “not until about 400 
B. C., when the local dialects began to yield to the ‘ common’ 
Greek of literary Athens, that the local alphabets also fell into 
disuse and were superseded by the common ‘ Ionic’ alphabet of 
twenty-four letters,” 
Mr. Sayce farther tells us that one of the Greek alphabets, the 
Euboeic, “was the source of all those which were employed in 
Italy, * * * * and modern research has now demonstrated, to 
use the words of Dr. Taylor, ‘ that all the Italic alphabets were 
developed on Italian soil out of a single primitive type.’ ” 
Using the identical words of a Darwinian botanist or zoologist, 
