the past tense, you represent William fallen under the infliction, there will be no direct evidence that he was knocked down; he may have slipt, or thrown himself upon the ground to avoid the stroke. If hieroglyphics, even though their practitioners were painters equal to Apelles or Timanthes, be so inadequate to exhibit actions by imagery, how much more defective must they be to express abstract ideas, which at best could only be doubtful deductions from the representations of images and actions in themselves equivocal!

The other instance of a hieroglyphic recorded and interpreted, to which allusion has been made, is not a pictured series, but the things themselves which were employed as symbols to communicate a message of defiance. When Darius Hystaspes had long been carrying on a fruitless war against the Scythians, the enemy sent him a present consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog, and a bundle of arrows; intimating thereby, that till the Persians could fly through the air like birds, live in the earth like field-mice, or under the water like frogs, they need not hope to escape the Scythian arrows. Is it not plain that a hundred different messages might have been transmitted with the very same emblems to a hundred different persons, each of which could only be understood by the receivers, according to the circumstances of their peculiar situation in respect to the givers; but not even then to be understood unless a verbal interpretation accompanied them, of which the emblems were to be neither more nor less than memorials?

lables more or less, according to their audible divisions.

But still this apparatus would be difficult and perplexing from the multitude of signs necessary; till a finer ear, trying syllables more accurately, would unravel sound as Newton's prism unravelled light, and discover its primary intonations as he discovered the primary colours. Thus the alphabet would be gradually developed, and a familiar sign being attached to each letter, a new creation of intelligible forms for embodying thought would arise, where all was silent, dark, and spiritless before. The lumbering, unwieldy logographic machinery is now confined to the unimproving and unimproveable Chinese, whose inveterate characteristic seems to be, that they obtained a certain modicum of knowledge early, which, for thousands of years, they have neither enlarged nor diminished. They have lent out their intellects at simple interest, and have been content to live upon the annual income, without ever dreaming that both capital and product might be immensely increased by being invested in the commerce of minds- the commerce of all others the most infallibly lucrative, and in which the principles of free trade are cardinal virtues.

This theory of the process by which letters were gradually invented, has been actually exemplified in our own day.-A Cherokee chief, having heard that white men could communicate their thoughts by means of certain figures impressed on soft or hard substances, set himself the task of inventing a series of strokes, straight and crooked, up, down, and across,

down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? - The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come: and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.-Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine, he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes: his eye shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk."

Here is an hieroglyphic table in three compartments: in the first, under the figures of a lion's whelp, a full grown lion, and a lioness couched among her young, the power and fierceness of a mighty conqueror are shadowed forth; in the second appears a sceptre, the sign of sovereignty, to be continued till a greater than Judah shall come; in the third, the vintage-scene evidently exhibits the future prosperity and happiness of his descendants in the land promised to their fathers. Now, might not these symbols be engraven and kept in the families of the sons of Jacob, not merely in general remembrance of the blessings appropriated to each of their tribes, but to remind them and their posterity of the literal language in which the prophecies were given, and on the preservation of the words of which depended the only assurance that the substantial truth had not been perverted by loose oral tradition?

We are told that the Egyptian priests inscribed upon pillars, and obelisks, and on the walls of their temples, all the lessons of wisdom and records of past events, which they taught to the privileged few who were their scholars. If the speculations here advanced have their foundation in truth, it is probable that

insulated from the rest of the world, endeavours to express his feelings and perpetuate his actions by imagery or mnemonics of some kind; now these, so long as he continues to improve in knowledge, will, in the same degree, be more and more simplified in form, yet more and more adapted to every diversity and complexity of thought. Nay, it is not too bold to assume, that, thus circumstanced, man, by the help of reasoning, reflecting, and comparing, would as naturally yea, as necessarily be led to the invention of alphabetical characters, as the young of animals, when they are cast off by their dams, are led by an ineffable faculty, which we call instinct, to all those functions and habits of life which are requisite both for existence and enjoyment, and which their parents never could exemplify before them during their brief connection. Birds may be imagined to teach their offspring how to eat, to fly, to sing; but no bird ever taught another how to build a nest, bird ever taught another how to brood over eggs till they were quickened into life; - yet every linnet hatched this year, will build her nest next spring as perfectly as the first of her ancestors in the bowers of Eden; and, though she never knew a mother's warmth before, so soon as her own first eggs are laid, she will sit upon them, in obedience to a kindly and mysterious law of nature, which will change her character for the time, inspire her with courage for timidity, and patience for vivacity; imposing on her confinement instead of freedom, and self-denial in the room of self-indulgence, till her little fluttering

no

very

family are all disclosed, and reared, and fledged, and flown.

If external circumstances thus conduct every irra-, tional creature, individually, to the knowledge and acquirement of all that is necessary for its peculiar state, it seems to follow, as a parallelism in Providence, that man in society, at one period or another in his progress of improvement in knowledge, would inevitably discover all the means by which knowledge might be most successfully obtained and secured; these being as necessary to the rank which he holds in creation, as the respective functions of inferior animals are to their different conditions. I cannot, however, allow it to be said, because I thus state the question, that I derogate from the glory of God, by not attributing immediately to Him, what He has no where claimed for Himself, in the only book written by his command. To Him nothing is impossible; with Him nothing is great or small, easy or difficult. His power is not more magnified by working miracles, than it was by ordaining, or than it is by upholding, the regular course of nature. "There is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth him understanding." Is it less, then, to say of the Almighty, that, by the understanding which He gave, man found out the divine art of writing (for divine in this connection it may be called), than to suppose, without any proof, that this art is so super-human, that it could not have been discovered, unless it had been absolutely revealed by the Deity? - No, surely; for though He made man a little lower than the angels, yet hath He crowned him with glory and ho