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"Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those boots"; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he began with the A's, following down the class in alphabetic regularity.
We cannot well have a better illustration of these principles than is afforded by the story of Cadmus, an adventurer who was said to have brought the knowledge of alphabetic writing into Greece from some countries farther eastward. In modern times there is a very strong interest felt in ascertaining the exact truth on this subject.
Simply apply it to the alphabetic Blocked-Out Square and the message is evident; no books whatever are required. A slip of paper and a pencil are all that are necessary; any one can write the square; there is not any secret as to it. The secret is the key-word. Harleston took a sheet of paper and wrote the square: Harleston put down the paper and leaned back.
THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS. Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire, but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of sounds.
There were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout church-goers sat during 'lessons', trying to look anywhere else than into each other's eyes.
Coleridge says about the primary art of writing: "First, there is mere gesticulation, then rosaries, or wampum, then picture language, then hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters," the last an evolution from all that went before. But there is no more suggestion of an alphabet in the sign language of the North American Indian than there is of man in a crinoid.
Whether these signs were ideographic or syllabic or alphabetic in the early stages we do not know; certainly they were alphabetic in the later stage. And the identity of most of the signs in Asia Minor and Spain shows them to belong to a system with commonly received values in the later times. What then becomes of the Phoenician legend of the alphabet?
These two nations used the same alphabetic system, though their languages were utterly unlike; and it would apparently have been the easiest plan for the new comers to have adopted the established forms, and to have applied them, so far as was possible, to the representation of their own speech.
The professor also states that he gave his opinion in writing to the man, that "the marks on the paper appeared to be merely an imitation of various alphabetic characters, and had no meaning at all connected with them."
In Ireland the receiving-machine presented its messages in the form of dots and dashes, which, according to arrangement, became alphabetic. You don't understand this, reader, eh? It would be surprising if you did! A treatise on electric telegraphy would be required to make it clear supposing you to have a mechanical turn of mind.
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