1886. | Editors’ Table. 253 
Professor Sayce goes on to remark: “In the struggle for exist- 
ence, the Latin alphabet alone survived among its Italian com- 
peers, and was carried, by the extension of the Roman empire, 
through the length and breadth of western Europe. Most of our 
modern European alphabets are its direct offspring.” 
In Russia and other Slavonic countries the alphabet was of 
Greek origin, as were the runes of our Norse forefathers. 
Professor Sayce even claims that “ the immense majority, if not 
the whole, of the alphabets used in the East are descended, like 
the alphabets of the West, from the alphabet of Phoenicia. The 
Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac are derived from the Phcenician, the 
Syriac being supposed to have been ‘the parent of the vertically 
written Mongolian and Mantchu.’” 
“In fact,” concludes Professor Sayce in his article on the origin 
of the alphabet in the Contemporary Review for December, 1885, 
“it is difficult to find any alphabet which cannot be affiliated to 
the Phoenician, widely different as the two may have become both 
in the forms of the letters and in the values they bear. Inter- 
mediate forms are continually being discovered, which bridge 
over the enormous distances and explain the transitions that time 
and space have effected. Even the Devanagari alphabet of San- 
skrit, whatever disputes there may be as to its exact pedigree, is 
generally allowed to be of Phcenician origin. With the exception 
of the cuneiform alphabet of the ancient Persians, and possibly 
One or two more which may yet lurk in obscure corners of the 
world, all the alphabets of which we know are derived, ultimately, 
from a single source. Utterly diverse as they are in their latest 
forms, the zealous enthusiasm of palzographists and inscription- 
hunters has succeeded in restoring them to their earlier shapes, 
in filling up the intervals which separate them from each other, 
and in showing that they are all but the manifold developments 
of a single germ. The history of the alphabet, in short, like the 
evan of its origin, is but an illustration of the doctrine of evo- 
ution on a large and easily tested scale. ‘Scientific paleography,’ 
to use again the words of Dr. Taylor, ‘rests on the assumption 
that no alphabetic changes are ever accidental or arbitrary, as was 
formerly assumed, but are the result of evolution taking place in 
accordance with fixed laws?” _ 
How vividly the language and methods of work employed by 
a scholars recall the language and methods of the philosophic 
iologists in their attempts to seek the missing links and ances- 
tral forms of life which complete and unite the chain of being! 
