=Written Language.=—Spoken Language lives only for the moment; words uttered to-day die and are forgotten to-morrow. To give permanency to his passing thoughts, when advancing civilization showed such permanency to be desirable, man devised Writing, the art of representing ideas by visible characters. Written Language is the vehicle of literature—the material in which the thinker embodies his conceptions for future generations, just as the sculptor gives permanent forms to his ideals in marble, or the painter on the glowing canvas. Writing is either Ideographic or Phonetic. The Ideographic System represents material objects _directly_, by pictures or symbols. The Phonetic System uses certain characters to express the articulate sounds by which such objects or notions are denoted, and thus _indirectly_, through the two media of sounds and characters, indicates the objects or notions themselves. IDEOGRAPHIC WRITING.—It has long been contended that the earliest method of conveying ideas was by means of pictorial images, and there is no reason for disputing such a theory. But this is not _written_ language; it is mere thought-painting, or the representation of objects and actions by pictures, and may satisfy the wants of primitive races in conveying a limited amount of information. Thus the American Indians informed one another of the presence and movements of troops, or of engagements that had taken place, by means of pictures. The emblems employed were generally understood among the different tribes: _e.g._, a tree with human legs stood for a botanist; and the figure of a man with two bars on the stomach and four across the legs, was a prescription ordering abstinence from food for two days, and rest for four. The original characters of the Egyptians and Chinese, of the cuneiform systems, and of the Aztecs, were, in like manner, _mere pictures_, and nothing more. The test of a written language is its ability to express abstract thoughts by single signs or combinations of signs; in this direction, rude symbols are found utterly wanting. It may be that picture-drawing gave the first impulse to the invention of phonetic writing; yet the origin of such writing, with its gradual development, is as hidden from us as that of language itself. We are justified, however, in assuming that wherever we have history, we have also written language. PHONETIC WRITING.—There are two systems of phonetic writing, the Syllabic and the Alphabetic. The characters of the former are used to represent _syllables_, or combinations of sounds (either words or parts of words) uttered by distinct impulses of the voice; those of the latter represent the elements of which these syllables are composed, or _letters_. History indicates that written language is always phonetic. In Egypt it is both syllabic and alphabetic; in Babylon, syllabic alone.