Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/113

Rh into its origin, Doalu said that the invention was revealed to him in a dream by a tall venerable white man in a long coat, who said he was sent by other white men to bring him a book, and who taught him some characters to write words with. Doalu awoke, but never learnt what the book was about. So he called his friends together, and one of them afterwards had another dream, in which a white man appeared to him, and told him that the book had come from God. It appears that Doalu, when he was a boy, had really seen a white missionary, and had learnt verses from the English Bible from him, so that it is pretty clear that the sight of a printed book gave him the original idea which he worked out into his very complete and original phonetic system. It is evident from Fig. 13 that some part of the characters he adopted were taken, of course without any reference to their sound, from the letters he had seen in print. His system numbers 162 characters, representing mostly syllables, as a, be, bo, dso, fen, gba; but sometimes longer articulations, as seli, sediya, taro. Though it is almost entirely and purely phonetic, it is interesting to observe that it includes three genuine picture-signs, ꗬ gba, "money;" ꖜ bu, "gun," (represented by bullets,) and ꕀ chi, "water," this last sign being identical with that which stands for water in the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

It appears from these facts that the transmission of the art of writing does not necessarily involve a detailed transmission of the particular signs in use, and the difficulty in tracing the origin of some of the Semitic characters may result from their having been made in the same way as these American and African characters. If this be the case, there is an end of all hope of tracing them any further.

In conclusion, it may be observed that the art of picture-writing soon dwindles away in all countries when word-writing