What surmounts the reach

Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best.-MILTON.

IKE the lower animals, man has a natural language by which he is enabled to express joy, grief, fear, love, hate, and other emotions, intelligibly to all of his own species. As an instinctive being only, this would suffice for him, as for the various tribes of inferior creatures; but as he is also rational, it is quite inadequate to the demands of his twofold character. Hence, the necessity of speech-a system of expression composed of simple sounds, differently modified by the vocal organs, and severally combined.

Doubtless, oral language continued long to be the only medium by which knowledge could be imparted or social intercourse maintained. But with the enlargement of ideas and the improvement of intellect, methods were devised for attaining a more durable and more extensive vehicle of thought. The first attempt to record events, or to communicate information by permanent signs, is believed to have been the use of hieroglyphics, such hieroglyphics being either purely pictorial — the expression of visible objects in the external world, or symbolic - the conventional choice of some external object to represent

These signs could be combined,― the sun and moon, for light; a man over a mountain, for hermit; a mouth and a bird, for song; a woman, a hand, and a broom, for wife; an ear and a door, for listening; an eye and water, for

To express abstract notions, use was made of analogies. For instance, a heart would symbolize the soul; a broom, woman; the two valves of a shell-fish, friends.

The first hieroglyphics are considered to be the Egyptian, whether they give the full contour of the object, with all the assistance of vivid coloring; or are simply formed by lines which rudely suggest it. Their symbolic use was extraordinary.

lowing table:

A few are exhibited in the fol

flaming censer,

water, liquid, seas, rivers;

to wash; freshness.

fire, heat; zeal.

man with long beard, gods, august persons, kings.

To this system, as a whole, the convenient term ideography is now applied. An ideographic sign -- for example, the symbol for life-might be used alone, to

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indicate the particular idea and the different words conveying this idea; or it could be made to stand for the sound of one of the words signifying 'life,' with a complete loss of the primitive sense. In this case the sign is said to be employed as a syllabic. Thus ank hear.' Here the duplicate sign, called a determinative, takes no part in the pronunciation, but merely determines the meaning to be attached to the word preceding it. The following syllabics are illustrative of this radical change:

This is the state of Chinese writing, as if the figure of a pear were made to do duty for the words pare, pear, pair, with signs to guide the reader to the sense which should be attached to the sound.

To each object, again, might be given, as less cumbersome, the sound-value of the initial of its name. Thus mouth 'ro' 'r'

Either in this manner, or by some slowly effected transition, would arise symbols which should represent immediately, neither ideas nor combinations of sounds, but single sounds, their pictorial value being forgotten or disregarded. Such signs, answering to our English letters, would be alphabetic. The following are some of the principal:

A very faint, but perhaps not an unprofitable, suggestion of these several modes of writing may be furnished by the following forms. The final character of each group, it will be remembered, is an ideographic determinative. The vowels, it should be added, were omitted at will in writing, and must be supplied in transcription. Let the words be resolved into their elements as ideograms and syllables or letters:

It thus appears that Egyptian writing was composed of a mixture of signs of two distinct classes: (1) ideographic, each sign representing an idea; (2) phonetic, representing a sound, either (a) a complete sound, that is, a complete syllable (syllabic); or (b) a simple articulation (alphabetic). It was inevitable, with the increase of writing, that the unwieldy hieroglyphics should, for convenience, be reduced to more and more abbreviated shapes, gradually departing so far from the original types as to

1 Season. 2 Horse. 3 Blood. 4 Divinity. 5 Outside. 6 Grasshopper.