The above illustrations from English characters are only given as the simplest way of conveying to the minds of those who have had no previous acquaintance with the subject, an idea of the nature of the process and force of the evidence, upon which the decipherment of hieroglyphic inscriptions is based. In reality the process was far from being so simple. Though many of the hieroglyphics are phonetics, like our letters of the alphabet, they are not all so, and many of them are purely ideographic, as when we write 1, 2, 3, for one, two, and three. All writing has begun with picture-writing, and each character was originally a likeness of the object which it was wished to represent. The next stage was to use the character not only for the material object, but as a symbol for some abstract idea associated with it. Thus the picture of a lion might stand either for an actual lion, or for fierceness, courage, majesty, or other attribute of the king of animals. In this way it became possible to convey meanings to the mind through the eye, but it involved both an enormous number of characters, and the use of homophones, _i.e._ of single characters standing for a number of separate ideas. To obviate this, what are called "determinatives" were invented, _i.e._ special signs affixed to characters or groups of characters to determine the sense in which they were to be taken. For instance, the picture of a star (*) affixed to a group of hieroglyphics may be used to denote that they represent the name of a god, or some divine or heavenly attribute; and the picture of rippling water ~~~~~~~~ to show that the group means something connected with water, as a sea or river. Beyond this the Chinese have hardly gone, and it is reckoned that it requires some 1358 separate characters, or conventionalized pictures, taken in distinct groups, to be able to read and write correctly the 40,000 words in the Chinese language. Even for the ordinary purposes of life a Chinaman instead of committing to memory twenty-six letters of the alphabet, like an English child, has to learn by heart some 6000 or 7000 groups of characters often distinguished only by slight dots and dashes. Such a system is cumbrous in the extreme, and involves spending many of the best years of life in acquiring the first rudiments of knowledge. Indeed it is only possible when not only writing but speech has been arrested at the first stage of its development, and a nation speaks a language of monosyllables. In the case of Egypt and other ancient nations the standpoint of writing went further, and the symbolic pictures came to represent phonograms, _i.e._ sounds or spoken words instead of ideas or objects; and these again were further analyzed into syllabaries, or the component articulate sounds which make up words; and these finally into their ultimate elements of a few simple sounds, or letters of an alphabet, the various combinations of which will express all the complex sounds