her,
that in many cases an intelligent Englishman might still guess the meaning
of a Sanskrit word. How little difference is there between Sanskrit _sunu_
and English _son_, between Sanskrit _duhitar_ and English _daughter_,
between Sanskrit _vid_, to know, and English to _wit_, between Sanskrit
_vaksh_, to grow, and English to _wax!_ Think how we value a Saxon urn, or
a Roman coin, or a Keltic weapon! how we dig for them, clean them, label
them, and carefully deposit them in our museums! Yet what is their
antiquity compared with the antiquity of such words as _son_ or
_daughter_, _father_ and _mother_? There are no monuments older than those
collected in the handy volumes which we call Dictionaries, and those who
know how to interpret those English antiquities--as you may see them
interpreted, for instance, in Grimm's Dictionary of the German, in
Littre's Dictionary of the French, or in Professor Skeats' Etymological
Dictionary of the English Language--will learn more of the real growth of
the human mind than by studying many volumes on logic and psychology.

And as by our language we belong to the Aryan stratum, we belong through
our letters to the Hamitic. We still write English in hieroglyphics; and
in spite of all the vicissitudes through which the ancient hieroglyphics
have passed in their journey from Egypt to Phoenicia, from Phoenicia to
Greece, from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to England, when we write a
capital F [Cursive F], when we draw the top line and the smaller line
through the middle of the letter, we really draw the two horns of the
cerastes, the horned serpent, which the ancient Egyptians used for
representing the sound of f. They write the name of the king whom the
Greeks called _Cheops_, and they themselves _Chu-fu_, like this:(8)--

[Three Egyptian signs.]

Here the first sign, the sieve, is to be pronounced _chu_; the second, the
horned serpent, _fu_, and the little bird, again, _u_. In the more cursive
or Hieratic writing the horned serpent appears as [Egyptian character]; in
the later Demotic as [Egyptian character] and [Egyptian character]. The
Phoenicians, who borrowed their letters from the Hieratic Egyptian, wrote
[Phoenician character] and [Phoenician character]. The Greeks, who took
their letters from the Phoenicians, wrote [Greek character]. When the
Greeks, instead of writing, like the Phoenicians, from right to left, began
to write from left to right, they