Let us consider how the thought would probably grow. The writers once started on the road of making signs stand for sounds would observe how much fewer sounds there are than objects and ideas, and that words even when unlike are composed of the same sounds pronounced in different succession. If we were employed in painting up a notice on a wall, and intended to use ideographs instead of letters, and moreover if the words manage, mansion, manly, mantles, came into our sentence, should we not begin each of these words by a figure of a man? and again, if we had to write treacle, treason, treaty, we should begin each with a picture of a tree; we should find it easier to use the same sign often for part of a word, than to invent a fresh symbol for each entire word as we wrote it. For the remaining syllables of the words we had so successfully begun we should have to invent other signs, and we should perhaps soon discover that in each syllable there were in fact several sounds, or movements of lips or tongue, and that the same sounds differently combined came over and over again in all our words. Then we might go on to discover exactly how many movements of the speaking organs occurred in ordinary speech, and the thought of choosing a particular picture to represent each movement might occur; we should then have invented an alphabet in its earliest form. That was the road along which the ancient Egyptians travelled, but they progressed very slowly, and never quite reached its end. They began by having syllabic signs for proper names. Osiri was a name that occurred frequently in their sacred writings, and they happened to have two words in their language which made up its sound--_Os_ a throne, _iri_ an eye. Hence a small picture of a throne came to be the syllabic sign for the sound _os_, the oval of an eye for the sound _iri_; in like manner Totro, the name of an early king, was written by a hand _Tot_ and a circle _ro_, and thus a system of spelling by syllables was established. Later they began to divide syllables into movements of the speaking organs, and to represent these movements by drawing objects whose name began with the movement intended. For example, a picture of a lion (_labo_) was drawn, not for the whole sound (_labo_), but for the liquid _l_; an owl (_mulag_) stood for the labial _m_; a water-jug (_nem_) for _n_. They had now, in fact, invented letters; but though they had made the great discovery they did not use it in the best way. They could not make up their minds to keep to phonetic writing, and throw away their pictures and ideographs. They continued to mix all these methods together, so that when they painted a lion--it might be a picture and mean _lion_, it might be a symbolic sign and mean _pre-eminence_, or it might be a true letter and stand for the liquid _l_. The Egyptians were obliged to invent a whole army of determinative signs, like those now employed by the Chinese, which they