n of
all ages have shrunk from accounting for it otherwise than as a boon of
divine origin. This feeling is strengthened by the singular circumstance
that so many alphabets bear a strong similarity to each other, however
widely separated the countries in which they arose.

In Egypt the invention of the alphabet is by some ascribed to Syphoas,
nearly two thousand years before the Christian era, but more commonly
to Athotes, Thoth, or Toth, a deity always figured with the head of the
ibis, and very familiar in Egyptian antiquities. Cadmus is accredited
with having introduced it from Egypt into Greece about five centuries
later.

From the alphabet the gradation is natural to compounds of letters and
written language, and, though speech is one of the greatest gifts to man,
it is writing which distinguishes him from the uncivilized savage. The
practice of writing is of such remote antiquity that neither sacred nor
profane authors can satisfactorily trace its origin. The philosopher may
exclaim with the poet:

"Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise. Of painting speech and
speaking to the eyes? That we, by tracing magic lines, are taught How
both to color and embody thought?"

The earliest writing would probably have been with chalk, charcoal,
slate, or perhaps sand, as children from time immemorial have been taught
to read and write in India. The Romans used white walls for writing
inscriptions on, in red chalk--answering the purpose of our
posting-bills--of which several instances were found on the walls of
Pompeii. Plutarch informs us that tradesmen wrote in some such manner
over their doors, and that auction bills ran thus:

"Julius Proculus will this day have an auction of his superfluous goods,
to pay his debts."

Next seems to have followed writing or engraving on stone, wood, ivory,
and metals, of which we have many early evidences. The Decalogue, or the
Ten Commandments, given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, was originally,
we are told in the Bible, written upon two tables of stone; the pillars
of Seth were of brick and stone; the laws of the Greeks were graven on
tables of brass, which were called _cyrbes_. Herodotus mentions a letter
written with a style on stone slabs, which Themistocles, the Athenian
general, sent to the Romans about B.C. 500; and we have another evidence
of the same period still existing--the so-called Borgian inscription,
which is a passport graven in bronze, entitling the holder to ho