But all this writing, so far, proceeded on the plan of making signs to represent things that you saw or the ideas that came from what you saw. And then, I imagine, it occurred to some inventive genius to say, "Suppose, instead of making these signs to represent things that we see, that we make them represent sounds--make them stand for the names that we call them by? Now, suppose we take the word 'dog': (only he, of course, would make use of the Babylonian sound, whatever it was, which they used for 'dog'). "Suppose we take the word 'dog,'" he said, "and suppose we take one of our signs, which we use to represent things, and let it stand for the first sound that we make in saying the word. Suppose that we take another sign to stand for the second sound, the middle sound, in the word, and a third sign to stand for the last sound." "Well," the people to whom he suggested the idea might say, "you do not seem to gain much by that. It would be much simpler and easier to go on making the sign for a dog, as we always have done." {71} "Yes," he might answer, "that is quite true, so far as writing about a dog, and a dog only, is concerned, but the advantage that I claim for my idea is that these signs, which I say we might use to stand for the sound that we make when we say 'dog,' may be used over and over again, whenever we have to make those sounds. And we do not make a very large number of different sounds--not nearly so many as there are ideas and objects that we wish to write about. So, on my plan, we shall not need nearly so many signs as we have been using." [Sidenote: The alphabet] I take it that it was thus, or in some way rather like this, that what we call writing (that is to say, making signs on paper or some other substance to represent the sounds by which we call things), came to take the place of the more primitive way of sending messages, or of making records, which was by drawing pictures of them. We, as you know, have twenty-six signs, twenty-six letters, in what we call our alphabet--twenty-six signs for the sounds that we make in speaking. The alphabet is called so from the first two letters "alpha" and "beta," corresponding to our "a" and "b," in the Greek alphabet. Different alphabets have different numbers of letters, standing for different sounds. In our own alphabet we know that the same letter, that is to say the same sign, may stand for different sounds. Take the very first letter "a," and take the words "father," "paper," and "many"; there you have three quite different sounds for each of which the one sign "a" does the work. An alphabet with signs enough to include all the sounds we make in talking would be terribly long.