ge in general advances from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, is in the multiplication of languages.
Whether all languages have grown from one stock, or whether, as some
philologists think, they have grown from two or more stocks, it is clear
that since large groups of languages, as the Indo-European, are of one
parentage, they have become distinct through a process of continuous
divergence. The same diffusion over the Earth's surface which has led to
differentiations of race, has simultaneously led to differentiations of
speech: a truth which we see further illustrated in each nation by the
distinct dialects found in separate districts. Thus the progress of
Language conforms to the general law, alike in the evolution of
languages, in the evolution of families of words, and in the evolution
of parts of speech.

On passing from spoken to written language, we come upon several classes
of facts, having similar implications. Written language is connate with
Painting and Sculpture; and at first all three are appendages of
Architecture, and have a direct connection with the primary form of all
Government--the theocratic. Merely noting by the way the fact that
sundry wild races, as for example the Australians and the tribes of
South Africa, are given to depicting personages and events upon the
walls of caves, which are probably regarded as sacred places, let us
pass to the case of the Egyptians. Among them, as also among the
Assyrians, we find mural paintings used to decorate the temple of the
god and the palace of the king (which were, indeed, originally
identical); and as such they were governmental appliances in the same
sense as state-pageants and religious feasts were. They were
governmental appliances in another way: representing as they did the
worship of the god, the triumphs of the god-king, the submission of his
subjects, and the punishment of the rebellious. Further, they were
governmental, as being the products of an art reverenced by the people
as a sacred mystery. From the habitual use of this pictorial
representation there grew up the but-slightly-modified practice of
picture-writing--a practice which was found still extant among North
American peoples at the time they were discovered. By abbreviations
analogous to those still going on in our own written language, the most
frequently-recurring of these pictured figures were successively
simplified; and ultimately there grew up a system of symbols, most of
w