or the tone of voice which accompanies them; and afterwards, in the absence of those natural signs, he retains the import of the words which he has associated with them. Dr. Bell, in his "Anatomy of Expression," has made the statement, that there are muscles in the human face, not found in the face of brute animals, which are plainly designed to facilitate expression; and that these muscles, like all others, unless developed and strengthened by use, wither and become uncontrollable. Hence it is, that deaf mutes, and persons engaged in instructing them, seem to have so much greater power of expression than others. They have cultivated the muscles, which serve as the organs of this silent eloquence. A fine illustration occurs of the power of expression, sometimes attained. We remember to have heard the statement from Mr. Rockwell, formerly an assistant teacher in the Asylum at Hartford, that he had seen a person take his seat in a room with one of the deaf mutes; and, folding his arms, relate, by the mere expression of his countenance, the whole history of the Roman Brutus, and of Peter the Great, of Russia, in a manner so intelligible that the deaf and dumb person would go and write out the various histories accurately, to the extent of perhaps half a sheet of paper. If the mere successive expressions of the countenance can be made so effective as a natural language, to what perfection and fulness may we not expect it to aspire, when aided by all the available activities of the whole frame!

Thus it is seen that the language of natural signs is not only the language of infancy, adapted to its understanding and its utterance, but also the language adapted to the infancy of cultivation and of knowledge. The language of natural signs is, in fact, the infancy of language, or infant language. It is the germ from which all language, and all improvements in language, proceed. And, from the nature of the case, we should expect, that the

*If we would describe to a child the meaning of the terms hard or soft, we should do it by recalling to his mind something he had seen possessing these qualities. If we would describe the meaning of the term fierce, it would not be by an abstract definition; but by acting out the quality before him; or, by citing his attention to some real or imaginary case, in which the quality had been exhibited. So Christ describes a wise and a foolish man, in Matt. 7: 27. The Scripture is, throughout, a collection of this sort of painting, which renders it so simple, and so intelligible, even to the meanest understanding, so powerful, so sublime."

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next step in the progress would commence from, and, to some extent, involve, the language of natural signs.

Our expectations in this respect are fulfilled. Hieroglyphics, the next step in language, might almost be denominated the language of natural signs made permanent. The images upon which the rapid and often exquisite imagination of the deaf mute fixes, being seized and impressed, in enduring forms, upon paper, would constitute a hieroglyphical language. Indeed the natural sign language of the deaf mute presents an evident progress, corresponding to the progress of Egyptian hieroglyphics, through all their stages, down to the semi-hieroglyphic characters of the Chinese, the less expressive alphabet of the Samaritan tongue, and the arbitrary forms of the letters of our own. A beginner, in speaking of a man, paints out, in his expressive signs, the whole man. An advanced learner thinks it enough to allude to the circumstance, that it is a personage wearing a hat. The former would describe the whole external appearance of a female; the latter would only seem to divide the hair of the head, or adjust the strings of a bonnet. In other words, in the advance of the language of natural signs, a single quality, or action, or characteristic, of any subject, is put instead of the whole. So in hieroglyphics, while in the infancy of the language, every thing is painted in full, in its progress to the Chinese, and thence downwards to our western tongues, a portion of a figure is made to stand for the whole, until, at last, if any portion remain, it is so far refined and polished away, as to have lost all resemblance to the original; degenerating into the arbitrary, but more convenient, characters of our common alphabets.

The meaning of the term hieroglyphic is sacred engraving. The object of hieroglyphics, however mystical and obscure they appear, was never to conceal information, but to communicate it. Every man is ambitious to transmit the memory of his achievements to the generation after him. It matters not how trivial they may be; to him they are as important as the campaigns of Napoleon, and weighty as the discovery of the laws of astronomy, or the invention of the art of printing. This principle of our nature led mankind, very early, to seek some method of speaking to posterity. Moreover, the same

contrivance, which enabled them to transmit information. to succeeding generations, furnished the means of communicating important facts to their brethren of the same tribe, whom, under certain circumstances, it was impossible for them to meet and address face to face. The earliest and rudest contrivance of this sort of which we have any knowledge, is found in the knotted cords of the ancient Peruvians. Very little is known, distinctly, of this ingenious method; perhaps, nothing beyond the bare fact that, by means of cords of different colors, variously knotted, they succeeded in preserving a dubious outline of events. Next in order are the rude paintings of the North American Indians, upon buffalo skins, and upon the trunks of trees, detailing the principal circumstances in the history of a battle, the character of the enemy, the number of scalps they have taken, and the direction in which they have fled, for the information of friendly warriors of their own tribe, or for the instruction of subsequent generations. These are true hieroglyphics. Of the same nature is the picture writing of the ancient Mexicans, which was used for all the common purposes of epistolary communication, and of historical record. When the Spaniards first appeared upon the coast, tidings of the event were sent, in this character, to Montezuma, with a description of the invaders. Many of the historical paintings were destroyed by the Spaniards. But Clavigero, in his "Ancient History of Mexico," enumerates the collections of them which have been preserved. Perhaps the most interesting is one which was imported to Europe by a Mexican, and translated into Spanish by the Marquis Spineto, who found it in the library of the Escurial. The translation is divided into three parts. The first is a history of the Mexican empire, containing the biography and conquests of not less than eleven kings. The second is a regular roll of the several taxes which each conquered province or town paid to the royal treasury. The third is a digest of their civil law. The whole painting is described at large in the Lectures of Spineto.

The writing of the ancient Mexicans was, however, inferior to the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians. It showed, in itself, no such tendency towards a simpler and more exact written language. Mexico never became

what Egypt has been. Notwithstanding the antiquities it boasts, some of which are truly surprising, and remind us more of Egypt than of any other country on the face of the globe, it never rose, in genius and cultivation, to an equal rank. We turn from the country of the Colorado and the Del Norte to the country of the Nile, with the gratifying feeling, that we are making some advancement, not only in respect to all the arts of civilized life, but, especially, in respect to the point with which we are concerned in the present article.

The name hieroglyphics (sacred engravings) was given to the written language of Egypt, because it was used chiefly in engravings upon pyramids, pillars, monuments, and the like, and because it was long supposed to be a mystical language, known only to the priests. The name, however, came, gradually, to be appropriated to every kind of picture writing. From the sixteenth century, many efforts were made to decipher the language of Egypt, as it was seen upon pyramids, mummy cases, and obelisks. No success, however, crowned the efforts of the learned, until the fortunes of war were, at last, made instrumental of unraveling the mystery. While a division of the French troops, occupying the village of Raschid, or Rosetta, "were digging the foundations of the fort St. Julien, they found a large mutilated block of black basalt, which was covered with a considerable portion of three inscriptions, in different characters." One of the inscriptions was in Greek. It contained a decree in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes; and, in the closing words, it was ordered, that this decree shall be engraven on hard stone, in sacred characters, in common characters, and in Greek." It was, therefore, at once made evident, that the two other inscriptions were in the sacred and common characters of the Egyptian tongue. The stone fell into the hands of the English, and was removed to the British museum, in London. Fac-simile engravings of the inscriptions upon it were distributed to the learned individuals and societies of Europe and America. Porson, with some difficulty, on account of the oblique fracture of the stone, gave a translation of the Greek inscription. Other learned men, among whom was De Sacy, of Paris, labored with various success upon the Egyptian figures. But the honor of discovering the meaning of them was reserved for Cham

pollion. Observing the fact, that the same combination of figures occurred repeatedly in the hieroglyphics, he set himself to discover, from their corresponding position in the Greek translation, the words and letters for which they stood. He thus obtained seven Egyptian characters. Shortly after, in another inscription, he had an opportunity to verify his conclusions, thus far, and to add five characters more to his catalogue. With the aid of these, he undertook to read the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, and found himself completely successful. With the attainments he has since made, it is said that this gentleman has read, without much difficulty, all common inscriptions. The investigations of Champollion prove that the Egyptians used three sorts of characters-the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the epistolographic, called also enchorial or demotic. The hieroglyphic are composed of exact and often splendid resemblances of almost every material object in the creation. The hieratic are a reduction, or, as it were, the running hand, of the hieroglyphic characters; a less perfect painting of the same objects. The demotic are a still further reduction, bearing about the same relation to the hieratic, that the hieratic do to the hieroglyphic. The hieroglyphic characters were, without doubt, the earliest invention. They were used, chiefly, in inscriptions upon monuments. The hieratic characters, as the name imports, were employed by the priests, in historical records, in the registers kept in the temples, and are also found upon monuments and mummy cases. The enchorial were used for all the common purposes of life, for epistolary correspondence, letters missive, &c. These characters are, besides, susceptible of a threefold division, according to their use-figurative, symbolical, and phonetic. It is in this last use, as indicating sounds and not ideas, that the transition begins to be seen from picture writing to the arbitrary characters of common languages. And it is probably this threefold use of the Egyptian characters, which has served, more than any thing else, to baffle and discourage so many diligent students.

It is not necessary to the object of this article, that we should enter upon a more accurate description of Egyptian hieroglyphics. They have, already, conducted us to the point which we sought, in our history of the progress