toward which all earlier stages of "record" tended. The sixth and last picture is the _Printing Press_, the embodiment and consummation of all the earlier phases and stages in the "records of the past." It is the obvious lesson from these great paintings that a "record of thought" by means of "words" was not fully achieved until the manuscript entered upon its world-wide and enduring career, or, in which "words" became the embodiment and depository of permanent and communicable "ideas." The words of Mr. E. C. Richardson are quoted as bearing upon the period of manuscript literature: "Some of the pictures on the cave walls of the neolithic age seem to have the essential characteristics of books and certainly the earliest clay tablets and inscriptions do. These seem to carry back with certainty to at least 4,200 B. C. By a thousand years later, tablet books and inscriptions were common and papyrus books seem to have been well begun. Another thousand years, or some time before Hammurabi, books of many sorts were numerous. At the time of Abraham, books were common all over Egypt, Babylonia, Palestine, and the eastern Mediterranean as far at least as Crete and Asia Minor. In the time of Moses, whenever that may have been, the alphabet had perhaps been invented, books were common among all priestly and official classes, not only in Babylonia, Asyria, and Egypt, but at least in two or three scores of places in Palestine, north of Syria and Cyprus."[4] The earliest literature of the ancient Greeks was first preserved in oral traditions, folk-lore, and legendary minstrelsy, and not in written language. It is possible, nay, probable, that in Greece, Egypt, China, Japan, and Persia also, folk-lore and folk-tales were perpetuated through memory by means of recitations, as in the instances of the _rhapsodists_--the class of professional reciters who publicly declaimed the Homeric literature and the folk-lore of the ages with more or less artistic inflection or intonation of the voice. The proclamations of rulers, the compositions of poets and historians, and the oracles of religion were anciently published orally, often, by heralds, minstrels, and prophets. The great Hebrew Lawgiver embodied a wide-spread principle and practice in his final injunction to the Hebrew nation: "Now therefore write ye this song for you and teach it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel." (Deut. 31:19.) Aside from narrower applications of this practice, the great achievements and deliverences of the Israelitish people were celebrated and perpetually memorialized in song and psalm. On the shores of the Red Sea, Moses and his people sang their song of deliverance from the hand of their enemy. And when, at a later age, the Ark of the Covenant was borne to its resting place within the Sacred City, it was amidst the antiphonal chanting of the psalm which David, himself, had composed for the occasion.