five hundred words in conversation. Such a person is no longer a savage: he has become a partially-civilized man.
Every letter used in the composition of this book has such a history of civilization as this. Tracing it to its fountain-head, we find ourselves on the banks of the Nile, among the pyramids of old Egypt, where men made their first rude attempts to write language. "In every letter we trace," says Max Müller "lies embedded the mummy of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph," or symbol. The Phœnicians, who were the travelers and the wide-awake people of their day, visited Egypt and there learned the use of letters. What the Phœnicians knew, they taught to the Greeks, who in their turn became the teachers of all Europe. They began to write language about b. c. 600. It was from these people that the Romans—whose alphabet we use—got their first idea of a written language. The very name they gave their letters tells the story. It is alpha beta, the first two letters of the series used by the Greeks. The written languages of the New World have no part in this history of our alphabet, as the characters used by the American tribes are of their own invention. It is very doubtful whether until this century any of them ever got much beyond picture-writing.
About the year 1821, Se-quoy-ah, a Cherokee Indian, heard a white man who was visiting his tribe read a letter. Those who have all their lives been accustomed to seeing people read have no idea of the effect produced on this untutored child of the forest when he discovered that the curious little black marks on paper had conveyed ideas to the mind of his visitor, and that there were other white men who would find the same meaning in them.
