communication vastly better, with its forty thousand signs for ideas, than the spoken means now chiefly employed, with its scant thousand or two. While the uttered vocabulary of the Chinese is one of the poorest in the world, their written one is eminently rich and abundant. This farther analogy with spoken languages it has, that, as was in the first lecture (p. 18) shown to be true of the latter, only a part of its resources are required for the ordinary uses of life: not more than eight or ten thousand of its characters are otherwise than very rare, and all common needs are supplied by from three to five thousand.
One more important mode of writing is said to be distinctly traceable to a hieroglyphic origin: namely, the cuneiform, the character of the monuments of Mesopotamia and the neighbouring countries. Its signs are made up of various combinations of wedge-shaped elements: hence the name "cuneiform" (from Latin cuneiformis, 'wedge-shaped'); they are also sometimes called "arrow-headed characters," from the same peculiarity. There are several different cuneiform alphabets, the older of them being exceedingly intricate and difficult, made up of phonetic, ideographic, and symbolic signs, variously intermingled; and sometimes farther complicated, it is said, with combinations which were phonetic in the language for which they were originated, and have been transferred to the use of another with their old meaning, but a different spoken value (somewhat, as has been pointed out, as we write viz., an abbreviation of Latin videlicet, and read it "namely"). Much that regards the history and relations of the different systems of cuneiform characters is, and may always remain, obscure: but it is confidently claimed that evidences are found which prove their beginnings to have been pictorial; and the peculiar form of their component elements is fully recognized as a consequence of the way in which they were originally written—namely, by pressure of the corner of a square-ended instrument upon tablets of soft clay; these being afterwards dried or burned, to make the record permanent. That, through such intermediate steps even as these, a hieroglyphic system may finally pass over into one truly alphabetic, is shown by the
