e moon by a crescent, a lion by a lion in the act of
walking, a man by a small figure in a squatting attitude. As by this
method it was possible to convey only a very restricted number of
entirely materialistic concepts, it became necessary to have recourse
to various artifices in order to make up for the shortcomings of the
ideograms properly so-called. The part was put for the whole, the pupil
in place of the whole eye, the head of the ox instead of the complete
ox. The Egyptians substituted cause for effect and effect for cause, the
instrument for the work accomplished, and the disc of the sun signified
the day; a smoking brazier the fire: the brush, inkpot, and palette of
the scribe denoted writing or written documents. They conceived the
idea of employing some object which presented an actual or supposed
resemblance to the notion to be conveyed; thus, the foreparts of a lion
denoted priority, supremacy, command; the wasp symbolized royalty, and
a tadpole stood for hundreds of thousands. They ventured finally to use
conventionalisms, as for instance when they drew the axe for a god,
or the ostrich-feather for justice; the sign in these cases had only a
conventional connection with the concept assigned to it. At times two or
three of these symbols were associated in order to express conjointly an
idea which would have been inadequately rendered by one of them alone:
a five-pointed star placed under an inverted crescent moon denoted a
month, a calf running before the sign for water indicated thirst.

[Illustration: 317.jpg PAGE IMAGE]

All these artifices combined furnished, however, but a very incomplete
means of seizing and transmitting thought. When the writer had written
out twenty or thirty of these signs and the ideas which they were
supposed to embody, he had before him only the skeleton of a sentence,
from which the flesh and sinews had disappeared; the tone and rhythm of
the words were wanting, as were also the indications of gender, number,
person, and inflection, which distinguish the different parts of speech
and determine the varying relations between them. Besides this, in order
to understand for himself and to guess the meaning of the author, the
reader was obliged to translate the symbols which he deciphered,
by means of words which represented in the spoken language the
pronunciation of each symbol. Whenever he looked at them, they suggested
to him both the idea and the word for the idea, and conseque