ally do so; the
disturbance is not in nature, but in the mind. No endeavor of man, no
advance of his from some old bivouac to a new camping-ground, affects
in the least the order of the world. The change, we repeat, is in the
man, and in the race to which he belongs.

Long and tedious has been the process of getting thought into a
recorded form. The first method of expressing thought was oral. Long
before any other method of holding ideas and delivering them to others
was devised or imagined, speech came. Speech is oral. It is made of
sound. Oral utterance is no doubt as old as the race itself. It began
with the first coming of our kind into this sphere. Indeed we now know
that the rudiments of speech exist in the faculties of the lower
animals. The studies of Professor Garner have shown conclusively that
the humble simian folk of the African forest have a speech or
language. Of this the professor himself has become a student, and he
claims to have learned at least sixty words of the vocabulary!

Strange it is to note the course which linguistic development has
taken. At the first, there was a _spoken_ language only. The next
stage was to get this spoken language recorded, not in _audible_, but
in _visible_ symbols. Why should it have been so easy and apparently
natural for the old races to invent a visible form of speech-writing
rather than an audible form? Why should the ancients have fallen back
on the eye rather than the ear as the sense to be instructed? Why
should sight-writing have been invented thousands of years ago, and
sound-writing postponed until the present day?

In any event, such has been the history of recorded language. The
early races began as the mother begins with her children; that is,
with oral speech. But at a certain stage this method was abandoned,
and teachers came with pictorial symbols of words. They invented
visible characters to signify words, syllables, sounds. Thus came
alphabetical writing, syllabic writing, verbal writing, into the
world. Ever afterward the children of men learned speech first from
their parents, by oral utterance; but afterward by means of the
pictorial signs in which human language was recorded.

This method became habitual. The eye was made to be the servant of the
intellect in learning nearly all that was to be gained from the wisdom
of the past. It was by the tedious way of crooked marks signifying
words that ideas were henceforth gleaned out of human lore by