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Here he was noticed by the Abbé de l'Epée, who was attracted by his quiet and aristocratic manners and gentle demeanour, and who at the same time considered that, by reason of his intelligence, he was likely to prove an apt pupil in acquiring the manual alphabet which the worthy ecclesiastic had invented.
At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet. Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free-trade and protection, he got little from Political Economy.
So I tried to make letters, and soon succeeded in writing my name, and then the word Fredericksburg, and so on. My father had previously taught me the alphabet, in the spelling book, before I had left the mill. After I became religious, I would carry my father's New Testament to church, and always try to get to meeting in time to hear the preacher read a chapter before sermon.
Yet the fact that our dictionaries supply diacritical marks for some thirty vowels sounds to indicate the pronunciation of the words of our every-day speech, shows how we let memory and guessing do the work that might reasonably be demanded of a really complete alphabet.
Today more than half of the people of the world use this Asiatic alphabet to keep a record of their thoughts and to preserve a record of their knowledge for the benefit of their children and their grandchildren. So far, the story of ancient man has been the record of a wonderful achievement.
In the State of Sao Paulo is a boy, Ramiro by name, now about thirteen years of age, the only son of parents who do not know a letter of the alphabet. Indeed, he is the only one in a large connection that has been taught to read. The family lives about twenty miles from their market town, Mogy das Cruzes, to which they go to sell the meager fruits of their labors on the little farm.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red, or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it up at all."
The figure, which is a word, a graphic sign, will permit of that unlimited progress which the mathematical mind of man has been able to make in the course of its evolution. In the material there is a box containing smooth cards, on which are gummed the figures from one to nine, cut out in sandpaper. These are analogous to the cards on which are gummed the sandpaper letters of the alphabet.
His genial loving-kindness and his fast increasing learning little fitted him to drill peasant children in the alphabet. "When I kept school the boys kept me," he used to confess with a merry twinkle. In all that our Lord meant by it William Carey was a child from first to last.
The Semitic family of languages, in which the vowel has a subordinate character and never can begin a word, facilitates on that very account the individualizing of the consonants; and it was among the Semites accordingly that the first alphabet in which the vowels were still wanting was invented.
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