rom
two or more stocks, it is clear that since large families of languages,
as the Indo-European, are of one parentage, they have become distinct
through a process of continuous divergence. The same diffusion over the
Earth's surface which has led to the differentiation of the race, has
simultaneously led to a differentiation of their speech: a truth which
we see further illustrated in each nation by the peculiarities of
dialect found in several districts. Thus the progress of Language
conforms to the general law, alike in the evolution of languages, in the
evolution of families of words, and in the evolution of parts of speech.

On passing from spoken to written language, we come upon several classes
of facts, all having similar implications. Written language is connate
with Painting and Sculpture; and at first all three are appendages of
Architecture, and have a direct connection with the primary form of all
Government--the theocratic. Merely noting by the way the fact that
sundry wild races, as for example the Australians and the tribes of
South Africa, are given to depicting personages and events upon the
walls of caves, which are probably regarded as sacred places, let us
pass to the case of the Egyptians. Among them, as also among the
Assyrians, we find mural paintings used to decorate the temple of the
god and the palace of the king (which were, indeed, originally
identical); and as such they were governmental appliances in the same
sense that state-pageants and religious feasts were. Further, they were
governmental appliances in virtue of representing the worship of the
god, the triumphs of the god-king, the submission of his subjects, and
the punishment of the rebellious. And yet again they were governmental,
as being the products of an art reverenced by the people as a sacred
mystery. From the habitual use of this pictorial representations there
naturally grew up the but slightly-modified practice of
picture-writing--a practice which was found still extant among the
Mexicans at the time they were discovered. By abbreviations analogous to
those still going on in our own written and spoken language, the most
familiar of these pictured figures were successively simplified; and
ultimately there grew up a system of symbols, most of which had but a
distant resemblance to the things for which they stood. The inference
that the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were thus produced, is confirmed
by the fact that the pictur