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by Cornell University Library 1993.ADDRESS
ON
THE ALPHABET-THE VEHICLE OF HISTORY,
BEFORE THE
N. Y. HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
AT ITS
81st ANNIVERSARY,
NOVEMBER 17th,	1885,
BY
LUTHER H. MARSH.
PRINTED BY THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.ADDRESS
ON
THE ALPHABET-THE VEHICLE OF HISTORY,
BEFORE THE
N. Y. HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
AT ITS
81st ANNIVERSARY,
NOVEMBER	1885,
LUTHEE R. MARSH.
PRINTED BY THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.A DISCOURSE
Is by no means an easy paper to prepare. It is a hazard-
ous piece of work. It is wrought out in cold blood.
Neither in form nor substance is it dramatic. It has no ex-
citements nor auxiliaries. It is not enlivened by music, nor
illustrated by scenery. And yet it is expected to hold, for
an hour or so, the attention of an intelligent audience, and
to instruct, or at least to amuse. It must not be too long,
nor too short. It cannot deal with the exciting issues of
politics, nor revel in the charmed domain of fancy. It
should be on a theme which will admit of various treatment,,
and on the thread of which pearls—if the writer has them—
may be strung ; or such gems as he can find—diamonds, or
opaque cobbles—as it may hap.
In looking around for a topic with which to fulfill your
kind invitation—I fear too presumptuously accepted—I saw
that any subject connected with my own profession, and with
which I should be more competent to deal, would not be
adapted to a general audience, nor to the occasion. And in-
questioning whether some isolated period of history might
not answer, it occurred to me that the simple means by which
all history is preserved—the alphabetic signs—which have
brought all records to our day, and are to carry all records
to the future, might be the better subject for my screed ;
and, therefore, let me ask your kind and brief attention to
some thoughts on
The Uses, Evolution, and Power of Phonetic
Symbols
The simplicity of means by which Divine purposes are
accomplished is, even so far as we can know, one of the most
amazing facts that we encounter in this life. The Almighty
establishes a principle, and thenceforth it is to perform
innumerable duties throughout time and the universe. A
single law pervades Creation, and is active everywhere.4
Though we fly to the remotest point that telescopes can
reach, we cannot get beyond the law of attraction ; but shall
find it there, constantly at work. Nor is there any spot
where the effects of light and shade—governed by the same
invariable rules, whether from the presence or the absence of
taper or conflagration, of star or sun—will not accompany us.
Music and Mathematics, different as they seem—one all
airy fancy, and one, all solid fact—are yet kindred, and
mutually based on numbers and magnitudes.
Astronomy and Chemistry—once thought so remote—are
now found in close alliance. There is sodium in the atmo-
sphere of the sun ; and the prism reveals the same elements
in the substance of the stars, as form the basis of our good
old Earth. Indeed, it is foreshadowed by the prophets of
science, that far back amongst the primal causes—perhaps
the first mandate of the great First Cause—will be found a
principle which will embrace gravitation, cohesion, light,
heat and electricity, under a common denomination, as out-
flows from one universal law.
So, in the duties which living men are called on to con-
front, each day, in all their dealings with each other, and in
all their obligations to their Maker. The multiform applica-
tions of law—civil and criminal, commercial, maritime, inter-
national—to the constantly'arising exigencies of life, may be
traced back, step by step, to principles more general, and to
others yet more comprehensive, until, at last, they find their
origin in those two brief mandates, which, as the Master has
revealed, and only He could have thus condensed them—are
the sources of all—love to God, and love to man—on which
hang all the law and the prophets—the law of gravitation of
the moral universe.
Only ten figures—the Arabic numerals, nine digits and
a cipher—are the simple instruments by which all calcula-
tions are effected. One figure, followed by twelve duplica-
tions of the cipher, represents a million of millions—an
amount too great for appreciation.
Guided by these ten numerals, two great astronomers
came to a simultaneous result quite astounding. Le Verrier,5
in France, from his quiet chamber wrote to the Astronomer
Galle, at Berlin, to point his tube to a given point in appar-
ent vacancy ; and, at the same time, Adams, in England,
wrote to the astronomer, Challis, at Cambridge, to do like-
wise ; each writer ignorant of the studies or action of the
other. The Cambridge observer swept too wide a circuit
with his lens, and thus the German anticipated him by
about ten minutes ; and lo ! far beyond the orbit of the
most distant planet then known, Neptune came out from
his hiding, and became enrolled among the knowledges of
men.
From Archimedes to Hutton and Daboll, these are the
only figures used—these ten. The distance of the sun ; of
suns so remote that they seem as stars; the minutes of the
earth’s life ; the business of the world; the massive ledgers
of banks ; the labors, productions, interchanges, of coun-
tries and classes ; of the farmer, in his waving fields ; of the
whaler, chasing his giant game ; the stevedore, breaking
bulk of distant cargoes ; the hammers of Birmingham ; the
spindles of Lowell, and the awls of Lynn—all these are
recorded, kept, transmitted and made available, simply by
the nine digits and a cipher.
The seven primary colors, now claimed by modern sci-
ence to be reduced to three—red, green and violet—which
bend in the bow of promise; how are they multiplied,
shaded, interfused, combined, in infinite variety of hue, in
flower and fruit, in mineral and vegetable, in bubbles of
soap and plumage of birds, in growth and fabric, in earth
and sea and sky.
The seven primary tones, bounded on five lines and
spaces of the staff, are, in their shades and combinations,
the sphere of all music, whether by voice or instrument, in
symphony or sonata, in opera or oratorio; from the delicious
strains that are wedded to the ballad, to the swelling masses
of melody which lift man above the world. By these tones
alone, flute and piano, viol and harp, dulcimer and drum,
trumpet and organ, speak to the ear and to the soul.
Though you may count them on the fingers, yet is their6
capacity utterly inexhaustible. Mr. Mill has left it on record
that at one time of his life he suffered distress from an idea
which had taken possession of his mind, that the various
arrangements of notes which made music must sooner or
later come arithmetically to an end, and then there would
be no more new tunes. Yet, all the great masters of har-
mony, who have been, and who are to be, can do no more
than hint their possibility. They are the alphabet of music,
and speak, in common, over the world; alike recognizable
by all peoples, though they cannot converse together; fol-
lowing an unchangeable phonetic law ; and forming, as yet,
the only universal language.
An organist has lately undertaken to interpret the music
of Niagara—to discriminate the notes of its mighty choral
mass of sound, as the fluid avalanche thunders into the
abyss—and finds there the same organ notes, though four
octaves below ; proving that Nature adheres to the seven
primary tones, even in the grandest diapason of praise she
sends up to her Creator. It may be that we will hear none
other, even when our ears shall be attuned to list the music
of the stars, quiring as they circle in the infinite depths.
Let us beware of neglecting great facts from our famili-
arity with them. We ought not, through daily acquaintance,
to grow dull to these beneficences, but should halt at the
wonders of common blessings, common in use but marvel-
ous in character and application.
But my theme is that mystery of mysteries, the alphabet
—its evolution, uses and power; the most remarkable in-
stance known to man of the capacity of the simplest means
to effect the grandest results ; the Alpha and Omega of all
thought and expression.
The difference between an alphabet and all other signs
and symbols for conveying thought can be easily defined.
An alphabet consists of simple letters, representing to the
eye nothing but primitive sounds of the vocal organs ; com-
bined sounds constitute a vocabulary, divided into monosyl-
lables, dissyllables, trisyllables, polysyllables.
Before the alphabet existed there could have been nothing7
to serve instead but signs or symbols, as they were used
by the Egyptians, the Assyrians and probably the Chinese.
Archaeologists are now devoting their subtlest inquiries
in that direction, as the Egyptologists are to hieroglyphics
and the Assyriologists to the cuneiform characters.
The oldest alphabet we have any historic knowledge of is
the Hebrew, which was adopted by the Phoenicians, as they
were originally Hebrews. That alphabet contained the He-
brew and Samaritan characters, and consisted, originally, of
16 letters—those which Cadmus carried to Greece.
Thus far have science and research gone in quest of the
origin of the alphabet. Beyond, all is conjecture.
I shall speak of the alphabet as composed of 26 letters,
for, though other languages have, some more, some fewer—
as, the French, 25 ; the Italian, 23 ; the Spanish, 27 ; Slav-
onic, 42 ; the German, 26 ; Russian, 35 ; Latin, 23 ; Greek,
24 (it had 16 till 406 B. C., when the Ionic characters were
introduced, making 24); Hebrew, 22 ; the Arabic, 28; the
Persian, 32 ; Turkish 28 ; Sanscrit, 44, and the Chinese, 214,
which latter, however, are not strictly letters, but ideographic
keys—yet, our good old 26 Roman letters, derived from the
Phoenician, the progenitor of all the others, may well stand,
for my present purpose, as the representative of all; and it
will be well for all nations when these letters shall be adopted,
as they will ultimately be, as the common alphabet of the
world.
Early, indeed, it was, when men began to strive for the
Alphabet. But so great a thing could not flash on man-
kind. It could only grow, oh, how slowly, to its develop-
ment. Hints of it, long before it was divulged, came out in
the Egyptian hieroglyphs ; but ages elapsed ere the written
expression of ideas culminated in letters—the written expres-
sion of single sounds—or, as it may be said, passing from
ideography to phonetic writing ; from Syllabism to Alpha-
betism. There is not space in a discourse—hardly in a book
—to trace these symbols back to their pictorial parentage—
to their descent from primitive hieroglyphs—from a time
which we cannot, as yet, measure, even by centuries ; nor to8
illustrate their transmutation till they have taken on their
present forms. That were, indeed, a curious study. As an
instance, we should learn that it was in a Script of 1327-—
nearly 560 years ago—that we first learn of our minuscule-
letter i having received the dot as its crown of designation.
Slow dawning through the lingering ages, from the first
hints of, perhaps, seven or eight thousand years ago, the
Alphabet yet eluded discovery, though the nations were so
near it. The Egyptians grazed it so closely that it is a
wonder they did not hit it. The Chinese missed it through
four thousand years of verbal phonograms. A strange
papyrian waif, recently came out from Thebes, older than
Moses, older, perhaps, than Abraham, ante-dating the Moa-
bite stone by twelve hundred years—the oldest writing yet
discovered—in the hieroglyphic characters used by the
Egyptian priests—called, by scholars, the Hieratic, contain-
ing the probable prototypes of sixteen of our Semitic letters ;
a relic which archaeologists assign to a period as long before
the birth of the Nazarene as our times are after it; and
therefore touching a period three thousand eight hundred
years ago.
My subject, therefore, means all forms of letters, whether
carved in stone or metals, or written on papyrus, on parchment
or paper, by which any people have attempted to send down
the years the memory of their thoughts or deeds. How
trivial these symbols look; the simplest things we show to
childhood ! But a sleeping force lies within them which
revolutionizes the world. Playthings though they seem, they
are the conduit through which spirit can manifest itself to
sense ; and thus they link the invisible and the visible worlds
together. Thoughts, floating in ether; intangible, spiritual
substances, that cannot be seen, that cannot be touched^
are caught, expressed, and chained forever within these
awkward-looking signs; and thenceforth are subject to
man’s use. There is an inherent divinity within them ; for
they descended on Sinai, and dropped into the tables of
stone, from the finger of God. His name is in them. Ripe
scholars, in every study in Christendom, are hard at work to9
link those symbols to their thoughts. The puff of steam, as
we walk the streets, comes up through the gratings ; fory
beneath is the subterranean monster venting his frightful
groans night and day, and toiling at these little signs. Your
own records, gathered through eighty years of skill and care,
by which you keep the doings of the past, and the volumes
to be added which shall preserve the actions and thoughts of
the present and the future—which now crowd your alcoves
and will continue to demand new spaces—are composed of
letters only, in varied combinations. The world’s bending
shelves hold but the changes of these simple elements. They
are the universe of knowledge. By them every imagination
can syllable itself. Their versatility is unlimited. Facts and
fancies, statistics and conjectures, are all within their grasp.
What agonies of passion have found expression in lettered
syllables. What energies have condensed their power, to
endow these marks with projectile capacity, and wing them,
animate and magnetic, in parallel flight with Time itself.
How faintly could Cadmus have dreamed, as, twelve hun-
dred years before Christ, he trudged through the sands,
bearing the letters from Phoenicia to Greece, with what un-
known powers he was laden. Never man or camel freighted
with so light, and yet so priceless a burden. Of all the
world’s inventions for comfort, for utility, for advancement,,
these little shapes are without a rival.
“They are,” says Alger, “ the embalmed record of
human experience and achievement up to the present time.
What has been said of history is at least applicable to litera-
ture, namely, that it is the message which all mankind
delivers to every man.” (School of Life, p. 412.)
Thus, only, can one age tell another what it has done or
thought. Limited, in time, are the facts and reflections that
can be orally transmitted.
Can a generation stamp its history on the invisible air ?
or will the restless sea hold durable records ? or will memen-
toes on Earth’s changing face speak to the coming years ?
Nature , is in closest alliance only with her most devout
students. She writes even her own autobiography in mysteryIO
—vailing it in the geology of the globe—to be patiently
studied through ages with pick and hammer ; faintly hint-
ing it in shale, and only suggesting it in sandstone ; leaving
her hieroglyphs dinted in the primal rock, and showing the
partial record to her scholars, on mountain top, or in dark
ravine ; disclosing fragments of her history, now in the worn
-margin of an ancient stream, in the exposed bed of the
retreating sea, or in the broken strata of earthquake
upheaval. But, though she files her earliest archives down
below the marl, below the gneiss, deep toward the central
frame-work of the globe, revealing glimpses of them only to
some adventurous Lyell or Miller ; and though she keeps
her annual tally in the rings of trees, and records the tread
of centuries in the laminae of rocks—showing that she reaches
far back into the preceding eternity, but will not say how
far—yet she cannot help man farther to record his history
than her dissolving materials will permit.
Across those vast eras of profound and awful silences —
before history began—where centuries passed unnumbered
like the moments of a night, when towering glaciers scraped
the mountain tops, and not a spear of grass nodded in all
the North—there comes no word, no syllable, no letter, only
the vague hints geology records.
The oldest tribes, to whom letters were unknown, at-
tempted, though ineffectually, to perpetuate those interest-
ing events which they were conscious posterity would be
glad to know. But the stones they reared for records were
silent to the future ; and even the rude characters they cut
for rock memorials could scarcely serve for other purpose
than to show how anxious these peoples were to float down
the stream of time some relic of their doings, but knew not
fully how. The stone which Jacob set up for a pillared wit-
ness between himself and Laban ; the great stones which
Joshua, as Moses had commanded, gathered on Mount Ebal,
to attest, through all future time, the passage of the Jordan,
are no longer, so far as we can yet find, evidences or
memorials—their shape, their size, their sites still unknown
—and the fact that they ever existed also unknown, save asIt is held—as it now will be forever—in the grasp of the
Alphabet.
So, again, did it early happen. Men said, “ Let us make
a name,” and lo ! the thoroughly burnt brick rose, tier on
tier, and story over story, as they would touch the skies and
lift a refuge above every deluge ; but what should we know
of the bold attempt, what record have of that old struc-
ture, had not these alphabetic elements of language shoul-
dered the history of the abortive effort, and borne it to our
times ?
Two thousand years, perhaps, before our era, the Temple
of Karnak rose, to look on the Nile as long as the Nile
should run. But still the Nile flows on, and for many a cen-
tury has met no returning glance from the great fabric; for
column and pier and architrave are gone ; only a few broken
shafts remain; even the huge city around it is hid in its
sepulchre of sand; though her primal glories and her hun-
dred gates live in the signs recorded by the stylus of the
Greek.
Those forms of granite, around whose sides the Libyan
sands have drifted for five thousand years, will not unclasp
their unrelenting hold upon the events they were intended
to commemorate. They only awaken scores of unverified
theories. They have, unless an Egyptian alphabet shall yet
reveal it, outlived the knowledge of the purpose of their
structure ; perhaps to record the compass points ; perhaps
to crown ambitious reigns; perhaps to sepulchre forgotten
kings :
“ Or Kine, for none know whether those proud piles
Be for their Monarch, or their ox-god, Apis.”
And now there comes, from the earliest to the latest
civilization, to stand in our monumental city of the Park, and
speak to the generations to come, a tall and graceful stranger
of the seventeenth century before our era, which has received
the glances of the great of old—of Moses, of Alexander and
the Caesars—and which has been alternately kissed by the
loving breezes of the Mediterranean and the hot blasts of the
desert for three thousand six hundred years. It is its secondinvoluntary, and we hope final, translation. It was the gift
of that enlightened and still living Prince of the Desert, the
late Khedive of Egypt. And yet, it should not be looked on
wholly as a stranger here ; for we had already brought from
its country to our own, and baptized our cities with the
names of Memphis, Alexandria and Cairo. It were an
unmeaning column but for the hieroglyphical symbols cut in
its sides. We thus know the quarry whence it was hewn,
and old Thothmes III. who set it up. And now—rendered
into our Phoenician letters, and diffused by type throughout
the world—though the damp Atlantic airs, in the long course
of time, may soften and erase the symbols it bears, only a
universal flood or a universal conflagration can banish them
from the knowledge of men.
Parenthetically, I may say, that I have now the privilege,
through the kindness of Mr. Borden, of the Park Commis-
sion, and Mr. Conklin, one of the Park officials, of presenting
to your society, a fragment of this monolith, taken from it
during its late repairs. By the skill of Professor R. Ogden
Doremus, the venerable shaft is now so prepared and pro-
tected that it will endure, it is believed, as long in the future
as it has in the past. This beautiful specimen, from the
corner of the column, still retaining the polish of thirty-
six centuries, may well take its place amongst your ancient
Egyptian relics; by the side of the hieroglyphical papyri, of
the bricks fashioned by the abject Hebrew slaves, and the
enchased signet ring of old King Cheops.
The unwrapped mummy will not ope his mouth. There
was unrolled, some years ago, at a Canadian museum, a
consignment from some Egyptian necropolis, perhaps from
Sakkarah, perhaps from Thebes. The features, as for the
first time in uncertain centuries they were visited by the
light, were of uncommon beauty; full, symmetrical, un-
marred ; an olive tinge, not ungrateful to the eye ; a single
thread of gray curled through the rich brown beard ; a scar
on the forehead suggested that it was a warrior who lay be-
fore us, and who, in the forty-five years of his life—for such
we judged his age—had risen, as was surmised from his ap-i3
pointments, to rank and command. We were tempted, as
we saw it a few days after its release, like Horace Smith, to
press him with a crowd of questions.
Tell us, ancient, stranger, what name you bore, what deeds
achieved ; with whom you were allied as son, or husband, or
father; what city claimed your birth ; were you the subject
of Menes, Sesostris, or Cleopatra ; wert thou captain or civil-
ian ; didst thou lead thy turbaned ranks, archers and spear-
men, with their dragon banners, victors over Nubia ; did you
behold “ the finned, the fanged, and hundred-footed” reptiles
swarm over the fields and through the abodes of Egypt, as
Aaron waved his mystic rod, or the incarnadined river pour
its crimson current for seven long days, or fire burst from
sky and earth and rocks in “ founts and cataracts of flame ” ;
did you see Lake Moeris dug, or hear the chisel ring on
Sphinx or Memnon ; was Isis or Ichneumon your Divinity ;
and has your sleep been unvisited, while closely enfolded in
your thousand yards of linen aromatic wrapments, for three
thousand years ?
But there is no ripple on the air; no word, no lisp, no
nod, no sign ; our questions return unanswered ; the bal-
samic efforts to preserve his identity are vain ; but a few
letters, painted on his case of sycamore, would have told us
all his story.
We knock at the stony lips of the cliff-hewn Colossi of
Abousambal ; those majestic sculptures of unapproachable
magnificence which, for twenty-five centuries, have listened
with equal indifference to the enthusiasm of travelers and the
roar of the Second Cataract, and lo, they speak to us in their
carven hieroglyphs ; recounting wars and tributes, cities and
embassies, and drawing portraits of the races of many a land.
Thus that ancient Pharaoh, Rameses II., while the He-
brews were molding their strawless bricks, limned his own
picture high in the mountain rocks, and, in symbolic repre-
sentation, scantily recorded his achievements.
How does our attempted repose toss and heave on these
seas of conjecture and imagination !
Tyre, who sat at the entry to the sea, whose marts wereH
crowded with caravans from Arabia and Babylon, whose
familiar prows cut the known waters, bearing to distant colo-
nies her fabrics gleaming with matchless dyes; Tyre, in all
her pomp and beauty, would have faded forever from the
canvas of the past but that her record was anchored in the
very phonetic tokens she claims to have originated.
We search for the sites of ancient cities, hidden by the
accumulated debris of ages, on which successive races have
come and lived and died, all unconscious of the evidences of
former life beneath ; we are delving hard around the deep
foundations to find some relics which shall hint their mode
of life and civilization.
We hang in rapture over a water-jug of Cyprus, because
it dimly suggests the life of an ancient people, and glimpses
the Cypriote habits; we walk amongst the relics restored to
light and science and history; we study the statues and
vases of terra-cotta; Osiris, Minerva and Pomona meet our
sight in bronze; Venus unvails her rounded limbs, and!
Hercules displays his knots of brawn ; we handle necklaces
and anklets and diadems from the tombs of Idalium ; signet
rings and kingly seals, and amulets of onyx; but we are yet
left to conjecture, for the most part, the history and habits
of those to whom these antiquities belonged.
And sad-fated Ilium—so famous, through letters, in song
and story, whose very situs has been unknown till now ; we
find there no Priam with his courtly state, no casqued and
cuirassed warriors ; but a few letters would have told us
where white-armed Helen looked from her turret, and where
Hector was equipped for the desperate fray.
And when, more recently, the same discoverers—the
enthusiastic Schliemann and his wife—search the plains of
Argos, dig up the foundations of Mycenae, and far below
the surface, within uncemented walls, whose unhewn stone
the Cyclopean muscles might have piled, they bring to view
golden girdles and sceptres, diadems and the paraphernalia
of royalty; uncovering the tomb of Homer’s “ King of Men,”
and looking on all that remains of him—his giant bones, his
golden mask and sword of bronze—the world could not buJ 5
receive with incredulity this conjecture, not authenticated
by the alphabet; and yet, even now, will scarce believe that
it is Agamemnon himself, ipsissimus ipse, who, sleeping for
three thousand years within that rock-ribbed sepulchre, now,
in the garments of his burial, comes forth to the light.
And now, within a few months, a pit in upper Egypt
astounds the world with its wealth of royal mummies, whose
names had receded almost into fable—of the crowned
Pharaoh, who ordered the twin needles now saluting each
other across the Atlantic, of the Kings Rameses, of the
daughter of one of them, she, it may be, who rescued the
sleeping babe from the crocodiles of the Nile, now lying in
her magnificent coffin, as natural and well preserved as if
fresh from the skill of the embalmer, though sent to her
repose ere yet the plagues of Egypt came.
The ages have held in their silent folds, in their remorse-
less cerements, the colossal power of the Roman Empire so
long, that unspringing pillar and stolen obelisk have fallen ;
the moon shines through the rents of palatial ruin, and all
material signs give but little intelligible history ; nor does
the yellow Tiber as it murmurs to the sea. The debris of
ages climb up and around her perishing monuments ; the
temples of Saturn and Concord bequeathe us only fragments
of a few broken columns ; while that of Vespasian, erected
only eighteen centuries ago, to commemorate the glory of
the conqueror of Judea, depends on conjecture to point
out even where it stood. Trajan’s column, it is true, yet
stands, but Trajan descended from its top twelve hundred
years ago, and another and a worthier, ‘ St. Peter himself,
went up to crown its summit and claim it thenceforth for his
own. Yet, amid the imperfect knowledge, as derived from
her temples and monuments, a few combinations of letters
hold back the curtain which would else have fallen on her
history ; and we may now march under her conquering
eagles, accompany the shouting legions as their chariots
roll beneath her arches, haste to the forum to drink the
magnificent periods of Caesar and Cicero and Hortensius,
and mingle in the very flood of her rushing life.i6
Suggestions of former races of men*—beyond the time to
which any knowledge extends—are often given by some
physical relic which the recesses of the earth disclose. A
desire to know more of man and the globe in their begin-
nings has given a new zest to modern research. On the
mountains, in the caves, under the lakes, works the scientific
delver. He finds a bone, and from it gives you a prehistoric
brother man. He exhumes, in Southern France, a rude
tracing on an ivory tusk, and lo, a long-haired elephant
stands before him, with flowing mane ; a fur-clad rhinoceros
looks him in the eye, and high-stilted elks gambol away. In
Denmark, under live forests, under peatbogs, under layers
of the fallen wilderness beneath the peat, he finds the bones
of birds and implements of stone in the embrace of forests
of pine, far below. Under Swiss lakes he descries the proof
of habitations, where men lived, propped above the water,
whose ripples sang under their floors in the days before men
■could write.
Even on our own continent-—which seems to us so new
—what races have been swept to the gates of darkness ; and
we are only just giving resurrection to their chronicles. The
new world is proved to be the old world, and to have first
shown its back above the waters. From the rents of the
earthquake, the man of Natchez comes forth, and eminent
geologists dare to name his age as not less than a hundred
thousand years. And the prehistoric fossil skull of Calaveras,
brought up in 1866, from the gravel a hundred and thirty
feet below the surface, through a miner’s shaft sunk on a
table-mountain, has reposed there so long, that over it have
been slowly formed, through cycles on cycles, successive
geological strata, with gravel-beds between—five beds of
lava and four beds of golden quartz.
The sepulchral hillocks of the West, which crowd Ohio,
Wisconsin, and the Mississippi Valley, are not of nature’s
make, but are the dumb mausolea of an extinct and otherwise
unsuspected race ; and we are bending pur reverent ears to
listen if some tradition may be whispered as to the origin,
history or character of the lordly owners of ouf soil, long ere17
Cabot or Vespucius set their sails before the wind. Cut in
the precipice sides, along the dizzy cliffs and high on the tower-
ing rocks of the Arizona canons, have just been discovered,
by our national explorers, the excavated homes of cities—
one, sixty miles in length—but nothing therein speaks of the
origin, name, language or times of these long-vanished
dwellers in the cliffs.
Events crowd so mercilessly on each other that tradition
would soon be overladen. Memory would have broken
down under the facts even of our own history. The morning
of our national life, though so recent, would already have
faded into twilight. The great Charter could not have held
and brought to us its emancipating truth, and Washington
and his generals would already have been vailed, like stalking
ghosts of the past. And if we go back, even in literary
England, only three hundred years, to an instance where the
record is not full, to men in whom the whole world is in-
terested, conjecture strives against reality, and many doubt
whether Bacon was not Shakespeare, or Shakespeare,.
Bacon.
A structure so recent as the Round Tower of Newport
puzzles the savants of the world ; for it yet hangs in doubt
whether this fabric is a veritable relic of the Northmen—
its mortar having clung together for nine hundred years—or
whether it must doff its ancient honors, and become prosaic
—admit itself a mere windmill, built by Governor Arnold,
so lately as the end of the seventeenth century, to catch the
perennial velvet breeze of Aquidneck, and grind its corn.
Even the attempts at Alphabetic signs—Cuneiform or
Runic—are able, sometimes, to reveal only a suggestion,
through the unskillfulness of the writer, or the ignorance of
the interpreter; for whether the strange characters carved
in the Dighton rocks, on the banks of the Taunton, are
Runic, and record the visit of Thorfenn to the New England
shores, five hundred years before Columbus came, or are a
modern picture of an Indian hunt, has, as yet, proved an
enigma to the sages of Europe and America.
The graphic art was not invented early enough—perhapsi8
the race required development ere it could make the dis-
covery—to have solved, as it might, the conjectures of
modern scientists, and tell us of the time when man, through
evolution, reached his present estate, as he progressed up
from lower conditions of existence. But oh, how slow the
progress ; for if, four thousand years ago, men lived, of form
and feature, character and intellect, equal to those who now
walk the earth ; if this long era has evolved no grander
legislator and statesman than the author of the Pentateuch,
no truer gentleman than the purchaser of Machpelah, no
poet of bolder wing or farther sight than he who wrote of
the patient man of Uz, then, indeed, must arithmetic fail
to count the infinity of years, which, at such a rate of
progress, could have developed Abraham and Moses and
the author of Job from Quadrupedal or Saurian forms ;
or, yet beyond this strange pedigree, from a vegetable
ancestry.
But, from what protoplasm such ancestral vegetables were
evolved, these sage deponents say not. Nothing but the
alphabet could have brought that mighty secret of creation
from the antecedent eternities. But, unfortunately, those old
plants had neither hand nor rudimental claw in which to hold
a pen. Even these protoplastic progenitors must be admit-
ted, by the modern Theory, to have originated from some-
thing below themselves ; for, if they came from a Creative,
Almighty fiat, then why not man, as well ? It would seem
as if we must, at some stage, as we roll backward the tide of
time, come to a point where things got started; for it is an
old and evident maxim that nothing comes of nothing. But
who gave the start ? Who created the incipient germ ?
And at what stage was it—can Tyndall or Huxley tell ?—that
unknowing material substance, as it progressed from pro-
toplastic jelly up to mankind, took on itself the capacity of
intelligent consciousness ? Oh, tell us, ye scientists, ye who
will believe nothing that cannot be demonstrated to your
own limited thought, come, give us now the evidence—when,
and where, and how it was, that unthinking matter leaped
the insuperable interspace, and on the hither side found itself19
endowed with the new powers of perception, thought,
memory, will and conscience !
Ah, if some old Cadmus of a trilobite or a toad-stool, a
radiate, a beetle, or a mollusk, had invented the alphabet
aeons before the Phoenician arose, then, perhaps, man, as now
developed, might have known when, as he passes the field or
wood, to lift his hat, with filial respect, to his vegetable fore-
father—a mullein or a thistle.
Far, far back among the cycles, when there was no
animal life on the globe, save such as went on all fours, if a
suggestion had arisen among the quadrupeds that, as an out-
growth from them, a biped would appear in the thereafters,
with faculties like a God, towering above all existences then
known, it could not have seemed less improbable than a
prophecy would now, that, as a development from man,
there will hereafter appear on the earth an evoluted race of
beings, dominating man, as far transcending him in intel-
lectual and moral qualities as he the ox ; and that, in that
time, man will necessarily assume a degraded position toiling
for his unapproachable superiors. Who is clothed with
authority to say that the process of evolution shall end in
man, any more than, in the former time, it might have been
proclaimed by orthodox authority that it should end in the
ape ?
And if men came up, by gradual changes and ascent, from
these lower orders, why did not the inferior race all come up ?
Why did one ape evolute, and another stay still ? This seems
unfair to the stationary brute. And if they had all come up,
no one could know that any had ever been below.
I am a believer in discrete degrees, and in an evolution
in each degree from the lowest to the highest stage ; but not
in the passage from one degree to another. Between them,
I venture to think, are barriers that cannot be surmounted.
The grand old law of evolution—pervading alike the
physical, moral and spiritual worlds, and destined to carry our
nature to the sublimest heights in infinite progression —
while it marks the processes of nature from imperfection
towards but never reaching perfection, cannot originate20
nor create ; nor can I believe that it has ever leapt impossible
chasms to create a thinking man, with conscious attributes
of immortality, from stocks or stones, from weeds or chim-
panzees.
In the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1867, one Mr. Hard-
beck writes : “ Nobody who reasons himself into a develop-
ment from the monkey has the right to take mankind with
him in his induction. His argument covers but one indi-
vidual—himself. As for the Hardbecks, they, at least, beg to
be excused from joining him in that logical excursion.”
“ I can trace my ancestry back,” says Pooh-Bah, “to a
protoplasmal, primordial, atomic globule.”
But, indeed, I am not inclined to “ travel by that road
which leads civilization back to savagery for its origin, or
carries the savage to his first Adam in the monkey ” ; but I
see, rather, “in the primitive man, a creature and a power,
worthy to issue from the immediate God, though committed
to nature and progress for his destined perfections.”
Said W. J. Colville, in one of his inspirational discourses :
“ Where Spencer finds the Unknowable, the spirit discovers
Eternal Mind ; where the Evolutionist fails to account for
protoplasm, or explain an atom, the soul finds Deity.”
Let us imagine a student anxious to learn all that has
been done and thought and known in preceding times.
Where shall he go ? Where but to these graphic primes, as
they stand on the written or printed leaf, or carven in bronze
or rock, can he resort for valuable or satisfactory knowledge ?
If he takes himself to Nature, he finds that all impress thereon
has been eaten away by the corroding tooth of time. He
gropes laboriously amid physical relics ; but a vague and
partial glimpse is his only reward. He visits his library, and,
one by one, the immortal sons of genius rise up before him
and unroll the scroll of all their knowledges. He who found
the doors of past science closed against him now sees them
swing wide open to the talisman of the alphabet. Now,
indeed, come forth to greet him the heralds of discovery and
invite his entrance. There he finds the field of human
achievement spread before him. Galileo holds to his eye thewonderful mechanism that draws within its range the radiant
rings of Saturn and the satellites of Jupiter. He looks again,
and Torricelli makes the heavy mercury the prophet of the
storm. Again, and the needle, quivering to an influence too
subtle to be traced by the senses, points, unerringly, amidst
the solitudes of the sea. Harvey tells him why the crimson
blushes in the cheek ; Jenner panoplies him against his most
direful foe ; Daguerre commands the pencil of the sun ; and
Gutenberg shows him how to render his thoughts eternal.
He turns once more, and Locke teaches him the secrets of
his own mind, Bacon instructs him in the true mode of
reasoning, Linnaeus descants on the beauties of leaf and
flower, Audubon brings down to him the glowing plumes of
unnumbered wings, Lyell inspects the riven crust and reads
to him from the Earth’s own diary, while Newton and Laplace
bear him along the star-pavement of the milky-way, and
Herschell maps the route.
He asks whether his race has lived in peace or joined in
the shock of battle, but the ocean has swallowed the evi-
dences of all contests on her surface, and the ground has
drunk the blood of the fallen ; he sails along the waters of
Trafalgar, but no ensanguined wave speaks of the corses
below ; he walks over the field of Waterloo, but nothing
there tells him of the awful scene it once witnessed. Redeem-
ing Nature hastened to erase the proofs, and has cushioned
t the trampled furrows with green. Our scholar goes back to
his book, where the magic panorama of written signs shows
him how one of the chief occupations of man, from the begin-
ning, has been to war with his fellow-men—how many plains
have been Marathons, and how many defiles Thermopylaes.
He inquires whether this continent was the cradle of his
race, or, if not, what adventurous spirit first sought it out
through the perils of an unknown sea. He gets no answer.
He opens the record of alphabetic signs and behold, the
vision of Columbus glints on his sight, standing on the prow
of his frail bark, his brow beaming with the signet of a new
world, and his eye piercing through the distance to the shores
to which he was guiding the old.22
Our inquirer then asks, what structures of utility and art
men have erected in former times for homes and public uses*
The Minerva of the Acropolis, the Ephesian dome, the
Sancta Sophia of Constantine, and the Temple of Mount
Moriah itself, with its marble walls and alabaster colonnades*
lifting its golden roof and sparkling pinnacles from the Mount
of Vision, flashing from afar like a mountain of jewels, no
longer strike the traveler’s eye. A broken column and a
crumbling arch but dimly hint the splendors of the past, for
the stateliest buildings man has reared are the daintiest food
for time,
He asks what mean those myriad lamps hung in the
empyrean roof. But no echo, even, responds. The revela-
tion comes through the alphabet, that these sparklets in the
sky—these “ patines of bright gold ”—are rolling worlds
it announces their distances, magnitudes and weight, their
orbits and velocities, at what precise second of time the
dial finger will point, as the shadows of an eclipse will begin
to darken the moon’s pale disk or obscure the effulgence of
the sun, or when, through the infinite heavens, the advancing
light will first appear of those fiery strangers that shoot into
our planetary system on unbounded journeys through the
endless space.
If we cut off our searcher from the knowledge of letters,
the world is robbed of its best and grandest gladness.
Quenched are the fountains of song. The burning leaves of
literature are torn away. The holy fire of the old prophets
blazes no longer. No poet’s music strikes the listening ear,
from the long reaches of the past, to dissolve him with its-
sweetness or thrill him with its inspiration ; no
“ Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world.”
These oracles of beauty are lost to him—these high
priests of the imagination—enchanters, divining the splen-
dors of the ideal kingdom, weaving delicious fancies and
sowing the “ earth with orient pearl.”
He opens the poetic page, and from its letters come23
innumerous voices in melody to his ear. The conceptions of
genius float down to him in delicious numbers. The inci-
dents, the history of the past, are thus pictured in all the
colors of the poet’s fancy. Let me instance an imposing
fact, preserved in the letters of the early oracles.
The great law-giver, whose name, but for the alphabet,
we could never have known—his duty done, his pilgrimage
ended—was permitted, from Pisgah’s towering top, to see the
rich and Heaven-chosen Land of Promise; looking over
Naphtali and Ephraim and Manasseh on the north, even unto
the blue summit of craggy Carmel by the sea, and on the
south over Zoar and the plain of the Valley of Jericho—the
City of Palms—to distant Beersheba, and there, while solaced
with the enchanting view of the land his people were to
possess, but which he was never to tread, and while yet in
the mount, was, from his high ascent, translated to a higher.
A poet thus sings his monody :
“ By Nebo’s lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan’s wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab,
There lies a lonely grave ;
But no man dug that sepulchre,
And no man saw it e’er,
For the ‘ Sons of God ’ upturned the sod,
And laid the dead man there.
" That was the grandest funeral
That ever passed on earth,
But no man heard the tramping,
Or saw the train go forth ;
Noiselessly as the daylight
Comes when the night is done,
And the crimson streak on Ocean’s cheek
Grows into the great sun.
“ Noiselessly as the spring-time
I	Her crown of verdure weaves,
And all the trees on all the hills
Open their thousand leaves,
So, without sound of music,
Or voice of them that wept,
Silently down from the mountain’s crown
The great procession swept.24
“ Perchance the bald old eagle,
On gray Beth-peor’s height,
Out of his rocky eyrie
Looked on the wondrous sight;
Perchance the lion, stalking,
Still shuns the hallowed spot;
For beast and bird have seen and heard
That which man knoweth not.
“ Lo, when the warrior dieth,
His comrades in the war,
With arms reversed and muffled drum,
Follow the funeral car ;
They show the banners taken,
They tell his battles won,
And after him lead his masterless steed,
While peals the minute gun.
“ Amid the noblest of the land
Men lay the sage to rest,
And give the bard an honored place,
With costly marble drest—
In the great minster transept,
Where lights like glories fall,
And the sweet choir sings, and the organ rings
Along the emblazoned wall.
“ This was the bravest warrior
That ever buckled sword ;
This, the most gifted poet
That ever breathed a word ;
And never earth’s philosopher
Traced, with his golden pen,
On the deathless, page, truths half so sage
As he wrote down for men.
“ And had he not high honor ?
The Hill-side for his pall,
To lie in state while angels wait,
With stars for tapers tall;
And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes,
Over his bier to wave,
And God’s own hand, in that lonely land,
To lay him in the grave.25
“ O lonely tomb in Moab’s land,
O dark Beth-peor’s hill,
Speak to these curious hearts of ours,
And teach them to be still.
God hath his mysteries of grace—
Ways that we cannot tell;
He hides them deep, like the secret sleep
Of him he loved so well.”
Thus, in every field of knowledge our inquirer, unaided
by letters, finds his progress barred. No light streams from
the past. Night holds him close and dark and helpless.
But let him once pass the door of his library, and all is light.
Silent, in his chamber, he can sit, and have portrayed to him
all past history ; review the great poets, historians, scholars,
chieftains and noble men and women of all times ; can repro-
duce the most beautiful landscapes ; can rehearse all anec-
dotes ; can bring before him the great events, the great
inspirations, and the overwhelming tides of bright romance.
Blessed, the patient, faithful alphabet-writers who, ex-
ploring new chambers, leave the keys, that we may enter.
They exercise a divine and unselfish faculty. Whoever
plants a sapling to stretch, in its growth, its protecting roof
of green earns gratitude ; but whoever, having found some
useful thought, some gracious discovery, to smooth the sharp
edges and soften the roughness of life, gives it per-
manence by planting it in the alphabet, mellows and enriches
the boon of existence.
By letters one generation can start where its predecessor
ends. What the former has gained is recorded, and held for
the benefit of its successors. Great fields of knowledge,
simplified and explained, are laid before the schoolboy. He
begins where Newton left off.
“ And in life’s lengthened Alphabet what used to be
To our sires X, Y, Z, is, to us, A, B, C.”
(Lucille, Canto II.)
Yet, we should be careful to discriminate between acqui-
sition and power; between the growth of knowledge and the
development of faculty. It does not follow that, because we26
may begin with all the learning of those who have gone
before, we can handle it better or as well. Our sculptors
may have finer tools ; but can the modern chisel be more
deftly handled, or bring the human form more exquisitely
from the Parian block, than when uncouth instruments of
early Grecian make were held in the hands of Phidias or
Praxiteles ?
Would you besiege any fortress of error, at whose battle-
ments truth has been held at bay? These signs of sound are
the army to break down its walls. A single battalion—a
harmless and inefficient set of warriors, we should suppose,
as we see them unharnessed, dispersed and sleeping in their
beds. And weak, indeed, they are, in assault or defense,
unless marshaled by skill. These alphabetic soldiers have
each many a duplicate, ready for duty elsewhere; but these
are only repetitions of himself, and, really, but one soldier ;
so that the whole command, however reduplicated, consists
of only the original twenty-six soldiers of the line. Though
but a “ corporal's guard ” in numbers, yet they are the
mightiest mimic host ever marshaled ; now here, now there, or
everywhere ; no military combination but they can instantly
assume ; no manoeuvre they cannot perform. We find them
in new position every morning, after the night’s activities ;
in solid column or by single file ; anon by echelon ; by either
flank ; displayed as skirmishers ; ready for new combina-
tions, born of the inspiration of the moment; coming from
unexpected quarters and in unanticipated shapes; and
officered, it may be, by many generals. Compared with
them the lance is dull, the scimitar edgeless, and the
triumphs of armies vain. What the success of Napoleon
compared with the sway of the Koran ? How trivial, how
limited, how bounded in by the burning plains of Egypt,
by the piling snows of Russia, by the alliance of Europe 1
The flashes of the warrior’s burnished armor have gone out
in darkness, and the echoes of his cannon have died among
the hills ; but the rhapsodies of the prophet rule over large
portions of the globe ; no lines of national demarkation could
arrest them mountains, seas and desert heats could not bar27
them out ; on they went, impelled by a mightier power than
armies could wield, subduing nations to one banner, creating:
a magnificent literature, inspiring an unshaken faith, till now,
after twelve hundred years, this little volume, lifts its Cres-
cent—the symbol of its power—over more than three
hundred millions of Mussulmans, from the Atlantic to the
Ganges.
The alphabet has gained a million-folded power—too
great for imagination to compass—in its capacity, by
types, of illimitable reproduction, by which it can be so dif-
fused that neither wars or conflagration can destroy the
record. Letters are thus kept in stable position, free from
alphabetic evolution, now tending to a common form—the
Roman—over the earth.
The alphabet is democratic. It trembles in no royal pres-
ence. It renders no special homage to rank or titles of no-
bility ; responsive alike to the plow-hardened palm of
Burns and the soft and jeweled pressure of Zenobia.
In the flesh, a great thinker might not be able to give us
his company ; distance, engagement, choice, or some unfav-
orable circumstance might not permit association ; but, as
he lives in letters, he has no option ; his time is ours. He
waits in the ante-room ; if we shelve him till our whim or
leisure bids him converse, he does not take it ill ; but bows,
and gives his best suggestions, while many another, not jeal-
ous or impatient, awaits his turn.
Says the Rev. Father A.J. Ryan :
“ Better than gold is a thinking mind,
That in the realm of books can find
A treasure surpassing Australian ore,
And live with the great and good of yore.
The sage’s lore and the poet’s lay,
The glories of empires passed away ;
The world’s great dream will thus unfold
And yield a treasure better than gold.”
The alphabet yields without stint, yet loses nothing—not
a letter. Its prodigality does not make it poor ; though al-
ways giving forth, yet never giving out.28
Sometimes a few letters assembled in a word—especially
if of a single syllable—will take the fancy captive, and fill the *
eye with charm and beauty; starting a throng of thoughts
of the joys, and wants and states from which it sprang, long
centuries ago.
Under what varying circumstances have these signs been
penned ; as when Carlyle works in the alcoves of the British
Museum ; as when Cervantes lights up his cell with the ex-
ploits of chivalry ; or Raleigh commissions them to fly
through the grating and bear his history down the ages ;
and Bunyan—whose fancy a bailiff could not seize on capias—
mounts from the spiked floor to the height of allegory at a
flight, and peoples his desolate jail with human forms.
Sometimes in blindness, as when Prescott traces letters he
cannot see, and adds new charms to history ; when Homer,
with darkened eyes, paints the conflicts of the gods and
demi-gods of old ; and Milton, with an audacity scarcely par-
donable, walked the garden of Eden and ventured into the
councils of God.
Letters are quiet companions ; these silent forms do not
disturb us. They are well-mannered and unobtrusive ; nor
are they envious ; the leaves of Comus do not curl in scorn,
because, for the time, you may prefer the companionship of
Hamlet; Hudibras does not let off a quaint couplet, though
he may know you are absorbed in the trials of Crusoe, nor
Junius point a poisoned barb, though he may see you in
abounding wonder at a luminous opinion of Mansfield.
Letters soften the asperities of life. The hate of poli-
ticians subsides. Pitt and Fox, Adams and Jefferson, Ham-
ilton and Burr, Randolph and Burgess, Jackson and Calhoun,
forget their hostility, and stand by each other in amity.
Anger cools his heated front, and friends and foes sweetly
lean their cheeks together.
The Alphabet walks the walls; a sentinel, to guard justice
and law. Banish it, and we are at sea ; all uniformity gone ;
all landmarks toppled down ; and life, perpetual incertitude
and contest. By it old Magna Charta bids defiance to time,
as to tyranny at Runnymede. Our own Declaration speaks29
to us, as to the Fathers ; tells Government how far to go ;
what ground of inalienable right is sacred from invasion.
By these symbols the spirit of a great author becomes
ubiquitous. While chained within its mortal coil, its mani-
festations are limited to a narrow range ; but when its
essence has been transfused into these representatives, it has
multiplied itself a million fold ; it may then walk a welcome
guest into every mansion in the land, and with tongues
innumerable discourse its wisdom to the world ; and his
thoughts, if great and good enough, will always speak. The
voices of the great Alphabet writers do not die. A divine
intellect may send forth noble thoughts, to glow and burn in
distant ages and climes, undimmed by time, to quicken
the life-blood, compel tears from their misty chambers, irradi-
ate the countenance with smiles, and charge the high resolve
on to manly endeavor.
The activity of the phonetic signs is especially conspicu-
ous in those nimble sheets which, with morning salutation,
tell you of the preceding day’s transactions of the world.
Deprived of them, one seems to stand aside from the great
thoroughfare of life, while the age is rushing past him. In
the desert and the capitol, on the Amazon, the Ganges, and
the Danube, in Australia, and farthest Ind, are quills
tracing these crooked marks ; while steamers, locomotives,
and cables, carry them through woods and towns and seas
to the loft of the printer. Transmuted there, in the editoriaL
alembic, the information instantly permeates society. The
newspaper is instinct with life. It embodies the very spirit
of the day. The heart of the world throbs visibly before us.
It is no phantom—it is the veritable truth of the day—spark-
ling, living, brimming ; brought not by lineal descent from
musty lore, but present, constantly arising, waking up
anew.
These few primordial signs find their culmination and
glory in the Sacred Word. Arranged by ancient prophets,
they have, at times, convulsed or soothed the world ; some-
times in their perversion crowding the dungeon and setting
the stake aflame; at others, relieving the pilgrimage and30
consoling the final exit of millions of our race. God has
thus supplemented, through letters, to the successive genera-
tions of men, what else they can only learn from the hills,
from His works, from unaided reason and the conscience. We
are not taught by His developments in history, save as they
are preserved in letters. The very thoughts of the infinite I Am
bend to infill them with divine significance. They are His
envoys—legates from the skies—commissioned to unfold
some knowledge of Heaven to the inhabitants of earth. Even
Omnipotence has not tried to evade its dependence upon
them. They reveal and interpret the still small voice of the
burning bush. They translate the thunders of Sinai; they
record the response to ancient Job from the tumult of the
whirlwind, and show us the test of his insignificance, when
invited to bring forth Mazzaroth in his seasons, or guide
Arcturus with his sons. David voices his celestial lyrics,
Isaiah bids the isles listen, the heavens sing, and the Earth
rejoice, at the expected advent; Ezekiel declares the vision
of Chebar ; Paul preaches on Mars Hill; the trumpet voice
that awoke the echoes of Patmos breaks o’er the world; and
the very words of the Divine, which blessed the conscious,
trembling air of Palestine, are scattered to all lands, tribes,
tongues and kindreds—the guide, the benediction, the
redemption of man.
Not the least remarkable suggestion as to the Alphabet
is, that at so early a period in the world’s history, long, long
before the knowledge of steam, of gunpowder, of printing,
or of the compass, while yet man was in a primitive condition
—there should have been given to him these forms—
since not materially changed—which can forever hold and
forever transmit every phase of thought and every fact of
history.
In our own English vocabulary what multitudes of words
have been wrought from these few phonetic signs ; they are
the contribution of every generation, and have come from
distant regions, ** so that,” as said by Samuel Johnson, u in
search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from
the Tropic to the Frozen Zone and find some in the valleysof Palestine and some upon the rocks of Norway.’’ And yet
but few of these words are used in common speech, though
it is said that fifteen thousand of them flowed from the pen
of Shakespeare.
In the first issue of Webster’s dictionary there were added
to our language over 12,000 words, not then to be found in
any other work ; making the whole some 80,000, and which
have increased, in the last edition, to about 120,000. And
now, the recent Imperial dictionary gives 130,000 words, to
be increased to 135,000 in the edition now in progress. New
words will be continued to be coined from the exhaustless
ore of the alphabet as new arts and sciences and businesses
require, and new emergencies demand. So that the problem
of the capacity of our alphabet ascends at once from the per-
mutations of the representatives of twenty-six fundamental
tones, to the changes of which 130,000 words, at least, are
capable.
The combinations of these signs will never cease*
Though all civilized peoples have been at work upon them,
in commerce and literature, in book and newspaper, in
ledger and correspondence, for so many generations, yet
are we no nearer the end. While the earth lives, new com-
binations will continue to be made.
And if, now, in the few thousand years since letters, in
their imperfect forms, began; if, in the comparatively brief
period since they came into use, they are freighted with such
knowledge, who can conceive the ample pages they will
spread before distant posterities, when the accumulating
treasures of eras shall have been added to their stores ?
What poets are to arise, what histories to be enacted, what
inventions macje ! Creation teems with hidden laws, capa-
cities and powers. With all our advance, we have scarcely
yet entered the vestibule of the Temple of Discovery.
We stand only on the threshold. New laws, new powers,
new applications of powers, will continue to dawn upon
the world. One by one, the earth, the sea, the air, will
give up the secrets of their occult forces. New lenses
will bring the planets near and nearer. That mighty32
2
factor in the world’s industry which is evoked from the
partnership forces of fire and water will, in numberless,
new forms, take on its shoulders the labors of man, and
combat the opposition of the elements. New motors will
come from out the air, from out the water, from out
the earth. Instantaneous correspondence, through seas
and over hemispheres, will be established. Those sur-
prises to science, the telegraph, the telephone, the micro-
phone, the photograph, the photophone, only point toward
coming surprises yet greater. And now, recently, the
stellar-photograph, whose plates have acquired a sensitive-
ness so amazing that they catch the image of worlds so far
away in infinitude that their rays are not even suspected by
the highest telescopic art! When announced that whis-
pered words may speed along the wire, almost concurrently
it comes that their highway may be laid along a trem-
bling beam of light. The essence we call electricity—of
which so little is known, except that no part of nature is
unpervaded by it—has permitted so much of its power to
be captured and utilized as will expel disease, impel the
wheel, flash messages around the globe, and illuminate the
night. It is to be the mightiest force in peace and war.
It is the amplest field of discovery, and promises the rich-
est harvest of astounding development. One thing we know,
that the sources of its potentiality are boundless, in the
fullness of the earth, in the amplitude of the atmosphere,
in, it may be, the limitless regions beyond.
The knowledge of all these inventions and discoveries
which the past has made, and with which the future is
full; the knowledge which genius may hereafter cull from
the now unknown ; the advances which societies and gov-
ernments may make ; the soaring of poesy and the creations
of romance ; the histories of men and nations, down through
all coming time ; the knowledge of everything said, written,
or done, or, in the advancing ages, to be said, written, or
done, are to find their home, their record and perpetua-
tion in, and only in, these few, simple symbols of—
THE ALPHABET.