The ant, discovering an inviting grain too heavy for itself alone, bears the intelligence to its fellows and promptly returns with aid. But such limited means of communication fall infinitely short of the perfect system which is exclusively man's birthright—which uses articulate sounds to represent ideas, and combines them so as to express every shade of thought.

Written Language.-Spoken Language lives only for the moment; words uttered to-day die and are forgotten to-morrow. To give permanency to his passing thoughts, when advancing civilization showed such permanency to be desirable, man devised Writing, the art of representing ideas by visible characters. Written Language is the vehicle of literaturethe material in which the thinker embodies his conceptions for future generations, just as the sculptor gives permanent forms to his ideals in marble, or the painter on the glowing.

canvas.

Writing is either Ideographic or Phonetic. The Ideographic System represents material objects and abstract notions directly, by pictures or symbols. The Phonetic System uses certain characters to express the articulate sounds by which such objects or notions are denoted, and thus indirectly, through the two media of sounds and characters, indicates the objects or notions themselves.

IDEOGRAPHIC WRITING.-The earliest mode of conveying ideas of visible objects was by pictorial imitations. We have examples of it in the original hieroglyphics of Egypt and China, and the cuneiform letters borrowed from their Turanian inventors by the Assyrians and Persians. It was also practised by the Aztecs or ancient Mexicans, and the inhabitants of Central America. Thought-painting, as it may be called, has this advantage, that to a certain extent it is understood as well by the illiterate classes at home as by foreign nations speaking different tongues.

Hieroglyphics, at first purely pictorial, at length became

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symbolic, an action or idea being represented by the outline of some material object to which it was thought to bear analogy. A picture of two legs, for instance, stood for the act of walking; a battle was indicated by two men engaged in conflict; eternity, by a circle; brightness, by a combination of the sun and moon, thus

The hieroglyphic system was objectionable on account of the multitude of symbols required, as well as the impossibility of expressing grammatical relations. It therefore gradually went out of use, while its characters were borrowed to denote the sounds of spoken language. During the transition period, however, these characters in many cases retained also their original signification; as if we should denote by one and the same symbol (a picture of the animal) the dog, and the syllable dog in the word dogmatical or by J (formed from the outline of a jay) both the idea bird and the sound of the letter j. This of course led to great confusion, and was long an insuperable obstacle to the interpretation of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped letters.

PHONETIC WRITING.-There are two systems of phonetic writing, the Syllabic and the Alphabetic. The characters of the former are used to represent syllables, or combinations of sounds (either words or parts of words) uttered by distinct impulses of the voice; those of the latter represent the elements of which these syllables are composed, or letters.

The characters by which the elementary sounds of any language are denoted, arranged in order, constitute its Alphabet. A perfect alphabet would be one in which every letter represented but one simple sound, and every simple sound was represented by but one letter-a perfection never yet attained.

It is to the Egyptians that the world is indebted for Alphabetic Writing. Their hieroglyphics, at first true pictures, then

symbols corresponding to abstract ideas, finally became, as we have seen, the signs of articulate sounds. But in Egypt the phonetic system was imperfect, the same sound having several symbols, and the same symbol standing for many sounds. It was left for the Phoenicians to remedy these faults, and complete the work thus begun.

Brought into commercial relations with Egypt at an early date, this enterprising people at once saw the advantages of phonetic writing; and by rejecting the ideograms (pictures denoting material objects), but retaining and modifying the phonetic symbols used in that country, they perfected an alphabetic system. The Phoenician alphabet contained at first sixteen letters, to which six more were finally added.

Such is the most probable account of the origin of letters. Tradition variously ascribes their invention to Thoth an Egyptian, to Cadmus the Phoenician, to Odin the supreme. deity of the Scandinavians, and to others. Of the varied exports of the Phoenicians, their alphabet was the most precious. Wherever their sails were spread, their letters were made known, and all nations sooner or later profited by this great Semitic invention. In the table on page 87 may be traced a decided resemblance between several of the Phoenician characters and the hieroglyphics in which they originated; also the successive changes by which they were modified in the earlier and later Greek and Latin letters-whence most of our English capitals.

Modes of Writing and Pointing.-As regards the direction in which their writing ran, ancient nations differed. In the Egyptian hieroglyphics there was no established order; but the figures of men and animals, facing the beginning of the lines, often gave a clue to the direction in which they were. meant to be read. As a general rule, the Indo-Europeans wrote from left to right, the Semites from right to left. The Laws of Solon and other Greek writings of that period (about

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600 B.C.) appeared in lines running alternately from right to left and from left to right, as an ox walks in ploughing; this ox-turning system" (boustrophedon), however, was soon followed by our present method. The Chinese, Japanese, and Mongols, wrote in columns, which were read from the top of the page, and from right to left. In the ancient Mexican pictographs, similar columns were read from the bottom.

The ancients did not separate sentences, or their subdivisions, with points; but wrote their words together, leaving the meaning to be deciphered from the context. Rings, ovals, or squares, were sometimes drawn around proper names, and words were occasionally separated by some device-a diagonal bar or wedge as in ancient Persian inscriptions; or a letter placed on its side, as between the following words: CONJUGI KARISSIMAE. In a Roman inscription found near Bath, England, a small occurs after every word : JULIUSVVITALISvFABRI. A peculiar sign was used, in some cases, immediately before the name of a god or of a person.

In the third century B.C., a system of punctuation, devised by Aristophanes, a grammarian of Alexandria, became known to the Greeks. It employed a dot (.), which had the force of our period, colon, or comma, according as it was placed after the top, middle, or bottom of the final word. The better system of modern times was not invented till the sixteenth century.

ANCIENT WRITING MATERIALS.

Stylus and Tablets.-The first writing was done on rocks with sharp-pointed instruments of iron or bronze, to record great events. Next came tracings on bricks of soft clay, afterward hardened by baking; and then writing with a metal. or ivory stylus on sheets of lead or layers of wax, from which erasures could be made, if needful, with the flattened end of the instrument.

Pliny speaks of leaden sheets, thus inscribed, rolled up in a cylindrical form when not in use. But under provocation the metallic stylus could be employed as a dagger; and when a Roman schoolmaster was killed by his pupils with their styles. and heavy table-books, the dangerous instrument was banished, and superseded by a similar one of horn. The early shepherds, we are told, imitated this mode of writing, making thorns or awls do duty as styles, and scratching their songs on leather straps which they wound round their crooks.

Wooden tablets, glazed to receive coloring matter, were used by the Jews and early Egyptians, and the former wrote. also with a diamond-tipped stylus on stone or metallic tables. The Greeks and Romans sometimes wired their tablets of citron-wood, beech, or fir, together at the back, so as to allow them to open like a modern book.

Calamus, or Reed.-A great advance was made when the stylus gave way to camel's hair brushes or reeds (calami) sharpened and split like our pens, and the tablets were replaced with papyrus and parchment. The reeds in common use came from Egypt, but persons of fortune often wrote with a silver calamus. The ink employed was thicker and more lasting than ours; sometimes prepared from the black fluid of the cuttle-fish, but generally from lampblack and glue, or from soot, rosin, and pitch.-Chalk pencils were at one time manufactured by the Egyptians and Greeks.

With the reed and ink, bark came into use as a cheap writing material; hence the Latin word for bark, liber, meant also book. Leaves, too, were employed for this purpose, particularly those of the palm-whence, perhaps, the leaf of a book was so called. But for manuscripts designed for permanent preservation, papyrus had the decided preference.

Papyrus, or the paper-plant, the bulrush of Scripture, grew in the marshes and pools of Egypt. Its branchless stem rose from five to ten feet above the water, and was sur