Long ago, when it was dangerous but very profitable to be thought a wizard, it was customary for any wise man who wished to be feared, and to keep his wisdom confined to himself and a few chosen disciples, to write his books in an alphabet or cipher of his own invention. Generally he took some existing alphabet as a foundation, and made variations on it, somewhat as Sequoiah did. I have in my possession a queer little treatise in Arabic, which claims to have been written after a labor of twenty years, and solemnly deposited in the royal treasury, during the reign of a certain Caliph who lived in Palestine more than one thousand years ago. It professes to give a key to the hieroglyphs of Egypt, but its greatest interest lies in the fact that the author has here brought together, in an amusing medley, all the alphabets and ciphers that he has ever heard of; perhaps some that he made up. Here in the upper wood-cut, for example, is a curious tree alphabet. The letters follow the regular order of the Arabic alphabet, each letter varying from the others by the arrangement of the branches on one side or the other of the trunk. Placing these in regular order with the corresponding Arabic letters underneath, the Arab had a simple cipher which the ordinary Oriental who only knows his own letters could scarcely read without the key. Another alphabet, as shown in the second wood-cut on p. 773, is evidently based upon a picture of the sun for _alif_, or A; while B, C, D, and the following letters are made by varying the first character. Remember that these, being Asiatic alphabets, are written so as to be read from right to left; but the letters are here placed in reverse order to be read like our own alphabet from left to right. This book contains also alphabets founded on the signs for the moon, and on those for the planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Venus. The one shown on this page is still another, which the author calls the “oldest Chaldean Alphabet.” And one can really trace a resemblance to Phœnician letters in some of these old signs. In fact, it is easy to invent fancy alphabets, as soon as the idea of an alphabet is familiar to the mind; but it is not so easy to induce people to use them. The alphabets actually used by the various nations of the world have been brought to their present state of perfection, as you have seen, by a slow process of growth, one step at a time, and each step the product of intense thought and ingenuity. The Cherokee is an interesting exception to this rule. Of late centuries, there have been few, almost no improvements in our alphabet. This is partly because it is so well adapted to our use, but principally because the invention of printing has tended to fix the style of printed type in one fashion. It is true that when books were first printed in England, the characters used were the indistinct so-called Gothic, or black-letter; but printers