WRITING, the art of recording ideas in means of characters or figures of some sort impressed upon some kind of material su's stance. History, though it does not throw corn pktc light on the origin of writing, suffices to show certain stages in its progress, and upon these a classification has been founded, whicb is, however, incomplete and unsatisfactor% The simplest classification and perhaps at a^ initiatory stage the best, is that which disides all writing into ideographic and phonograph c or signs representing the things ay-Inhabited hi words and signs representing sounds. that is oords themselves. Less satisfactory u the classification of writing into three historical stages, the figurative, the transitional or coo %entional, and the alphabetic. In the first of these, to which hieroglyphic writing below'. %%riling is supposed to he pictorial or inusiesh ;.ttly representative of objects After this, eit the transitional period comes symbolical writ i 'c. in which abbreviated pictures are trans formed into arbitrary symbols, first of ;old afterward of sounds and words. Laub. with the prevalence of phonetic writing sounds are represented first in syllables and afterward ia letters. The course of writing is generally in the direction thus indicated, but it is inaccurate and misleading to represent these stages as epochs in its progress. As the most modern waiting contains traces of the first of these methods, so the earliest contains traces of the last. The majority of the letters in modern alphabets can be traced to symbols or abbrevi ated pictures representative of things, but as the thing originally represented is usually an object %hose name begins with the sound repre sented by the letter, there is no evidence that the sign was not originally intended in a double sense and used as a phonograph. In Egyptian hieroglyphics we have ideographs and phono graphs mixed together. This, however, does not prove the absolute precedence of ideographs, but only the imperfection of the phonographic elements in that system. The same thing oc curs in the Mexican picture writing, which was lung supposed to be purely ideographic. Its phonetic signs are syllabic, not alphabetic. In our own system we use figures and other sym bols when phonographic signs are too slow for our purpose, and with a less perfect phono craphic system this would naturally occur much more frequently. It does not appear, moreover, that any transition from pictonal to phonetic v:riting is necessary through arbitrary non rhonctical symbols. Both of these modifications
would no doubt proceed simultaneously from in dependent causes. Pictorial signs not phonetized would he abbreviated as well as phonetized signs, and when the phonetized abbreviations came to prevail the non-phonetized abbrevia tions would be phonetized also, thus producing the appearance of a transition from arbitrary symbols to phonetic signs.
The reason why writing has had to pass through various stages of pictorial and more or less arbitrary symbolical representation before reaching the more perfect development of the alphabetic form is not very difficult to discover, and it has an important bearing on the order of development. It is not because the representa tion of words is in itself more difficult to con ceive than the representation of things, or because when the desire for writing as a me dium of communication is excited the human intellect is inadequate to the task of forming at c nee an entire phonetic system. Had phonetic or even alphabetic representation been the only possible means of constructing a written symbol all difficulties would doubtless have been over come by one sustained effort, as they have ;ctually been by many partial ones; but as an easier process was to be found and would di rectly suggest itself as a means of meeting the immediate demand, the more elaborate process *ac excluded and prevented by this process from !sing performed. Nothing is easier than to mfr a rude pictorial representation of cer tain ol.sects. To draw something resembling a man v.ould be easier than to agree on a sign to represent the word man, hence ideographs would naturally precede phonetic symbols. But for the same reason the earliest systems of 11 riting would not he purely ideographic but mixed. There are many things which form the subject of the least sophisticated human corn mtmications which cannot be represented pic torially When writing was first practised these things were already represented by words, and the idea would naturally occur to form a sign to represent the word, that is, a phonetic sign. These signs could not be directly pictorial, but they might be allegorical or symbolic, and in the absence of analysis of sound they probably would take that form, although the direct in tention was to suggest conventionally a specific word by the symbol. This sort of symbol might be called a mnemonic. From such symbols to merely arbitrary syllabic and alphabetic symbols the transition would be easy.