A Ship bound for a foreign port takes its position at least once everytwenty-four hours that it may know whether it is keeping to the right course. In the same way a writer who is trying to make headway across a part of the intellectual sea that has as yet been incompletely charted, must occasionally consult his compass lest he be thrown upon the rocks of rhetorical nonsense and perish miserably amidst the wreckage of his own eloquence.The compass, in my case, is the dictionary.The literary compass is not quite as dependable as its nautical sister, but like some sorts of time-tables, it is better than nothing at all.Behold what the“Britannica,”in its bright and cheery way, has to say about the mouth:“The mouth, in anatomy, is an oval cavity at the beginning of the alimentary canal in which the food is masticated.The opening is situated between the lips, and at rest its width reaches to the first premolar tooth on each side.

“The lips are fleshy folds, surrounding the opening of the mouth, and are formed, from without inward, by skin, superficial fascia, orbicularis otis muscle, submucous tissue, containing numerous labial glands about the size of a small pea, and mucous membrane ha the deeper part of each lip lies the coronary artery, while in the midline is a reflection of the mucous membrane on to the gum forming the frnum labii.”

This shows me that I should have called this chapter“the vocal cords”rather than the mouth.

But vocal cords are a part of the human anatomy which rarely enters into polite conversation. The average person vaguely associates them with tonsilitis or colds, and in the popular mind(as is shown clearly by a number of proverbs and by Holy Script)the mouth is the instrument of speech rather than“an oval cavity at the beginning of the alimentary canal in which the food is masticated,”as the encyclopdia so charmingly puts it.

Therefore when I use the word“mouth”I really mean“speech”and when I say that the greater part of the civilization of the human race is based upon the multiplied functions of the mouth, I am referring to man's gift of speech and to his ability to communicate his own thoughts to his neighbors by means of the greatest of all his manifold inventions—by means of a thoroughly developed system and thoroughly reliable system of highly differentiated sounds which go by the name of language.

I am not so rash as to imply that animals have no language of their own. There have been too many puppies and kittens in this house and too many swallows underneath the eaves of this roof to let me ever be guilty of such a dangerous piece of arrogance.Cats and dogs and horses and cows and birds and seals(and I suppose whales, though they are hard to keep in an aquarium and therefore a difficult object of study)are constantly telling each other things, and when they are bringing up their children, they become particularly loquacious.

But their language(as far as we know it, but I hasten to add that our information upon the subject is hopelessly restricted)seems limited to a brief code of warning signals, all of them intimately connected with the two overpowering passions of their lives, the desire to perpetuate their own kind and their desire for food. Abstract ideas, which play such an important rle in human relations, are entirely beyond their reach and even Hans, the mathematical horse, and Consul III, the learned ape, would be greatly puzzled if called upon to tell each other about the League of Nations or the relative merits of Christianity and Buddhism.

I shall be careful not to enter into a discussion of the origin of language. I don't know a thing about it.Not from any lack of available material, for there is any number of books upon the subject and they are brimful of the most learned details.But when they reach the main point of the discussion, they show in a most painful way that the mystery is still far from solved.

We know a lot about the development and growth of language.

The difficulty arises when we try to discuss at which precise point man ceased to be inarticulate and became articulate.

Problems like these make me wish that I could come back to this earth a couple of thousand years hence. We have learned such an incredible amount about ourselves in the few years that we have been able to devote to the subject, that undoubtedly some day within the next few centuries we shall be able to say:“Then and there, at that precise moment, Man ceased to grunt like an animal and began to speak like a human being.”Meanwhile and in anticipation of that great moment, I grateftlly register the fact that the mouth(read“the vocal cords”)has done more for the development of the human race than any of the other organs, not excluding the highly useful hand and foot.For the mouth has given us a chance to pour all our accumulated knowledge into a form of permanency, and that means that every new generation becomes heir to all the wisdom accumulated by its ancestors.

The circumstance that the human race has apparently descended from a number of slightly varied ancestors, who did not possess a common form of expression(like those animals which belonged to the same basic group)may have accounted for the slow progress we made in the beginning. All this was changed as soon as some one discovered that every combination of groans and hisses in one dialect had an approximate counterpart among the combinations of groans and hisses of all other tongues, and that therefore it was possible to pour the contents of one language into the mold of another with practically no wastage of lost ideas and broken words.

Thanks to the art of the translator, Mankind has become one great intellectual brotherhood. I do not mean to say that all people everywhere avail themselves of this marvelous opportunity to improve their minds by borrowing the knowledge of their neighbors.The vast majority does not care about such stuff.It wants to be decently fed, have a roof over its head, educate its children and go to an occasional movie but that is about all.

But those who do the real work of this world, whether they live in China or in Greenland, in Australia or even Poland, they are none of them obliged to base their conclusions upon their own observations alone. Even if they had never learned to read and to write, even if the human race had never invented the alphabet, they could still learn what other people in other parts of the world had thought upon the subject by means of a good interpreter.And the poor savage who first suspected that words could be weighed against each other, as if they had been so much soap or cement or hay, stands revealed as the man who made the human race a unit in its warfare upon the gigantic forces of ignorance and fear.

Knowledge, however, is a luxury, while ordinary, plain living is a necessity. And the original purpose of the voice was to be an instrument of warning, rather than a means of instruction.An instrument of warning not only against those dangers that were visible but even more so against those that were not visible to the human eye and therefore infinitely more dangerous, since one could not take any precautions against them.

Remember that the less civilized a group of people happens to be, the more they believe themselves at the mercy of occult powers. Their lives are spent in fighting hidden enemies who lurk in the bushes and hide behind trees or at the bottom of wells, and whose sole purpose it is to frighten poor peasants, gobble up their children and cast spells upon their cattle.

The case would be quite hopeless but fortunately spooks are of a very timorous nature. It is possible to frighten them away by making a lot of noise.Shout as loudly as you can and no goblins will ever get you.

Shouting, however, is very tiresome work and bad for die vocal cords. And so at a very early date the human voice was replaced by a hollow piece of wood which acted as a substitute for the mouth and in booming tones told all the wicked specters to take warning and be gone.

Under ordinary circumstances a short tattoo upon a drum would put the fear of God into the little devils, but when they were very persistent(which happened in die spring and in the summer)it was necessary to drive them away by beating the tom-tom for days or weeks at a stretch.

How profoundly this habit of frightening away the bogies with the help of noise entered into die social system of the human race was shown by the tremendous popularity which the ringing of bells acquired during the Middle Ages. The church bell, a metal mouth mad nothing else, was kept reverberating morning, noon and night.Gradually its original purpose was forgotten and it was used for a number of other purposes.It announced the time of day and told die serf when it was time to get up and when it was time to go to bed.But it never quite lost its original character, and on Sundays and holidays a prolonged ringing of the bells warns the faithful that they should come to church and incidentally it purges the atmosphere of those tmclean influences which might have a detrimental effect upon the proper conduct of divine services.

The Mohammedans, for some strange reason, have never taken kindly to bells. They have remained faithful to the human voice and employ human beings who climb to the galleries of specially built towers and from there enlighten the world about the great virtues of Allah and the not less remarkable accomplishments of his chief prophet, Mahommed.In how far these officials could make themselves useful as fire-gongs and cyclon sirens, that I do not know.But fortunately these are items about which the average follower of the half-moon is not apt to worry overmuch.

In Europe, however, where government more and more occupied itself with the common weal(a matter to which the Mohammedan rulers were as a rule blissfully indifferent)the mouth was used for a large variety of purposes all of which were directly connected with the business of either telling people what they ought to do or warning them away from what they ought not to do.

I do not merely refer to the horn with which the medival town guard tooted his little tune to tell the good burghers that all was well with the world and to remind them that they must be careful of their fires. I am thinking of several more ambitious purposes for which the augmented voice was used in bygone days.

There was the problem of navigating the seas at night. As long as one was far away from the coast it was plain sailing.The chances of collision were small and the shallow vessels of that time were not afraid of an occasional sandbank.But when the ship approached land after sundown, then the difficulties began.It would, of course, have been possible for the Romans and the Greeks to put a slave with a fine baritone on every promontory and let him shout words of warning to the approaching mariners.But it is doubtful whether there were enough slaves with enough good baritone voices to keep all craft from harm's way.Something else had to be devised to act as a substitute for the human mouth.The difficulty was solved by having wood fires on the tops of the more dangerous ledges.The lighthouse made its appearance as a modified voice.

The general esteem in which such towers-of-warning were held we learn from the fact that the ancients honored the lighthouse of Alexandria(built 300 years before the birth of Christ)by giving it honorable mention among the seven wonders of the world. Incidentally, the architect who built it must have known his business, for the famous Pharos shed its rays upon the seas for more than sixteen centuries and it was then destroyed only by an earthquake.

The Romans(I hardly need say it)were great lighthouse keepers. Only let them construct something that had to do with roads and harbors and traffic regulations, and they would spend millions upon it and improve it until it was well-nigh perfect.All along the coast of Europe they built their warning signals.Dover and Calais had their lighthouses long before our own ancestors had ever heard of a lamp, let alone a tower.

During the Middle Ages the lighthouse system came to a temporary end. The buildings, wherever they had not fallen, to ruin, were fixed up as churches and the shores were left in darkness.But with the return of commerce, the signal towers once more became an everyday necessity.At first coal was substituted for wood as a means of illumination.Then came gas and oil.To-day electricity acts as a substitute for the mouth and silently shouts its warning words as far as thirty miles away.

Lighthouses, unfortunately, could function only on clear nights. Whenever there was fog, they were useless.On such occasions light had to be replaced by sound.At first it was enough to ring a bell.But the bell did not carry far enough for modern sea traffic.The foghorn, a tremendously amplified voice operated by steam, was then given a chance until the invention of wireless telegraphy.

Since then a quietly whispering voice tells the mariner of his danger, and within a very few years, both lighthouses and foghorns will have become as obsolete as the fire-gong. For the modern mouth likes to work discreetly.It tries to be efficient but in a quiet and dignified way.Like all human devices, it can be terribly abused as those of us know whose neighbors are possessed of portable phonographs.But given half a chance, the mouth will behave with great decorum, as you will know if you have ever listened to those other multiplications of the power of the mouth known as“far-speakers”and“far-writers.”

At first whenever one man wished to communicate something of importance to some one else, he could do this by means of his voice or by means of his hands. The sign language, however, was soon disregarded for the sound language.To-day it survives only among the deaf and dumb, but otherwise has become completely extinct or is used to accentuate the spoken word.The method of communicating by means of sound, on the other hand, has taken a tremendous development and its history is very interesting.

Already on the oldest Babylonian sculptures we find pictures of rudimentary“far-speakers.”We see engineers bossing a hoisting job. A thousand slaves are pulling the ropes.The engineer stands on a little platform.He carries a megaphone in his hand.The megaphone is, of course, a magnified mouth.Through this megaphone he shouts“Heave ho!”and all the slaves pull at the same moment.Without the magnified mouth, the engineer's voice would not carry to so many people at the same time.It is the first attempt to multiply the power of the voice an unlimited number of times.It is the beginning of those endless future experiments which eventually led to the telegraph, the telephone, wireless and radio.

There are certain inventions which attracted very little attention on the part of the public when they were first made. The reason was that they did not enter into the daily lives of enough people.But everybody has at one moment during his career felt himself bandicapped by the fact that the voice would not carry for more than a couple of hundred feet and everybody, therefore, was interested in the attempts that were being made to overcome this difficulty.As a result we can follow the development of the“far-speaker”throughout the ages much better than that of the multiplications of most other human organs.

If tradition is right(and tradition is often much more reliable than history based upon documentary evidence),the news of the surrender of Troy was telegraphed to Greece by means of smoke signals. In Africa since time immemorial the different tribes have communicated with each other by means of gigantic drums which were belabored with a stick, and thus spelled out messages which were as clearly understandable to the natives of the Congo as the Morse Code is to the employees in a Western Union office.

During the Middle Ages when the more civilized part of humanity rived in small, high-walled cities, like wild animals cooped up in a cage, pigeons were used to carry messages whenever the town in question was being beleaguered by an enemy. On the ocean, whenever the weather was sufficiently clear, information was forwarded to passing vessels by means of signal flags.

These clumsy methods of magnifying the human voice were quite sufficient for the needs of small communities. But when states kept growing larger and larger and became more and more centralized, no government could expect to survive for very long unless it could make its voice heard in every part of its domains at one mad the same moment.Couriers, drums, carrier pigeons were of little use during a crisis and the life of every big modern nation is one endless succession of crises.In consequence thereof the eighteenth century, the age of consolidation of vast dynastic and racial groups, also became the era of wholesale telegraphic experiments.

Since the French were the first to centralize their government, they quite naturally became the pioneers in the field of long-distance transmission for the human voice.

In the spring of the year 1792 an engineer by the name of Chappe approached the National Convention with a fully worked out plan for an“optical telegraph”—a machine that was to be worked from the tops of conveniently located church towers and hills and which consisted of a couple of wooden arms, fastened to a transverse bar. The position of the arms, which could be changed by means of ropes and pulleys, spelled out the letters, and officials with spy glasses read the messages and relayed them to the next towers, and so on and so forth, until the words had been duly carried from one town to another.

The thing worked remarkably well and during the Napoleonic era the greater part of Europe listened to the dreaded imperial voice by means of M. Chappe's semaphore.

It suffered, however, from one great disadvantage. It was impossible to keep the messages secret.The town loafers used to congregate around the church towers and puzzle over the different signs until they were able to read the alphabet as easily and as fast as the operators themselves.That made it necessary to look for some other way of conveying information that should not be quite so public.

But just when the semaphore was giving up the ghost, the world had begun to play with a charming new toy, called electricity. In every town and hamlet some obscure village genius was trying his luck with this mysterious current, in the hope of making himself rich by finding some way to make it carry communications from one place to another.In every German laboratory a solemn professor was wasting his wife's last pennies upon batteries and pieces of copper wire, that he might be the first to give the world its common voice.

An American painter by the name of Samuel Morse won the race. In the year 1837 he converted his easel into a telegraphic apparatus.This first machine could talk at a distance of 1,700 feet.A year later he felt that he had progressed far enough to bring his invention to the notice of Congress.But Congress was busy with something or other and did not listen to him until balf a dozen years later.At last, in the year 1844,Washington and Baltimore talked to each other by means of an electric current.

Then the different European governments, which had been absolutely indifferent to Morse's plans as long as they were in the experimental stage, began to show signs of interest and to-day the human voice, reduced to dots and dashes, penetrates to every part of the civilized world. For the telegraphic wires soon bade farewell to dry land and took to the water.As soon as ships had been constructed big enough to lay 3,000 miles of cable, the wires were stretched across the bottom of the ocean and the people of New York found themselves living in a suburb of London, and vice versa.

For quite a long time the electric telegraph was able to satisfy all the needs of verbal international intercourse. But as our planet continued to shrink more and more under the influence of the multiplied hands and the multiplied feet, there arose a demand for something that should not be quite so dependent upon the presence of the very expensive cables that were an integral art of Samuel Morse's invention.

The notion of speaking from one town to another without the assistance of any intervening wire was an old one. As early as the year 1795 a Spanish physicist by the name of Salva had explained the feasibility of such an arrangement to the Academy of Science of Barcelona.The Academy had listened patiently, as learned Academies are apt to do, and then had forgotten all about it.

A generation later, a German, quite independent of his Spanish colleague, had tried to establish wireless communication by forcing his electric current to pass through water. The trouble in those days was that no one knew the exact nature of the material with which he was playing his little game.It was left for Heinrich Hertz, one of the most brilliant scientific detectives of all times(and so ardent a worker that he investigated himself into an early grave),to show us a way out.He did not reach the point at which he could tell us what electric waves really were, but he discovered the laws which regulate their behavior, and that in itself was an enormous gain.After the publication of Hertz's work, the problem of wireless telegraphy was taken up in all seriousness and every nation tried to be the first to bring the search to a successful conclusion.

A young Italian by the name of Marconi managed to get a single wireless letter across the ocean. The other members of the alphabet followed in rapid succession.To-day even the ship's captain, who for thousands of years has been the most independent of citizens, is obliged to listen to his master's voice no matter how far he may be away from land.And an airplane lost in the clouds is still in touch with the earth and can be warned of an approaching storm as easily as if it were within hailing distance of the human voice.

But the appetite, as the French proverb has it, comes with the eating. As soon as the art of“long-distance writing”had become an established fact, people were no longer contented with their little plaything and began to clamor for a machine that should allow them to indulge in the unknown luxury of“longdistance speaking.”

Thousands of years before, the Chinese had invented a toy which consisted of two bamboo tubes connected by a thin wire, which made it possible for people to converse with each other over a distance of several hundred yards. It was one of those perennial trifles that return regularly every two or three generations, are advertised all over the place as“the latest novelty,”are hawked from every street corner, and disappear once more as inexplicably as they have come.The people of the Middle Ages played with it and so did those of the eighteenth century.And just when everybody was talking about the great possibilities of the electric current, the old Chinese thingamajig popped up for the fiftieth or hundredth time and was being sold widely at all county fairs.

It seems to have inspired several people with the notion that this might be the way to carry the human voice from one spot to another. A Teuton by the name of Philipp Reiss was the first to perfect such an instrument of“sound transmission.”It worked so well that he dared give it the ambitious name of“telephone,”the apparatus-that-carried-the-sound-of-the-human-voice-across-space.

Fifteen years later a Scotch immigrant by the name of Alexander Graham Bell, who lived in Boston and was a teacher in a school for the deaf and dumb, solved the problem of sound transmission by giving us the modem telephone with which all of us are familiar.

How the voice which depended upon a wire for its transmission grew into the voice which could project itself without any wires whatsoever, that is a story of such recent date(and to the present author of such incomprehensible mystery)that I shall give you a picture and let it go at that.

But to-day it would be possible to destroy every book that was ever written and still keep the human family fully informed of everything that was being done and thought and said everywhere by use of the multiplied mouth. For all we know, even the long-suffering citizens of Mars and Saturn may be listening in when the raspberry experts of our great Repuhlic tell the good people of the northern hemisphere how to make their preserves without burning the sugar.

Which brings me to the most important part of this book, which I have kept to the last, pardy because it is more important than anything else I have said and partly because it is so hard to explain in sentences of not more than fifty words each.

Granted that it is almost impossible to decide at what precise moment in their history our ancestors acquired the ability to speak, it is even more difficult to follow the process by which they arrived at the conclusion that the spoken word could be conserved and that the sounds which left the lips could be caught and kept in a permanent form for the benefit of posterity.

The age in which we live will be known as the Paper Age. We wallow in the printed word.Without books, without timetables, order-blanks, telegraph-blanks, telephone directories, newspapers, magazines, without myriads of little pieces of driedout wood-pulp covered with funny little black pothooks and semicircles our modern civilization would soon come to an end.

It is practically impossible for a citizen of the year 1928 to think himself back into a paperless age. And yet, if we represent the length of time that man has lived upon this earth by a period of twelve hours(running from midnight to noon),the art of putting ideas into the concrete form of the written word was invented no longer than nine or ten minutes ago.

But how it was invented and by whom and where and under what circumstances—all that still remains a mystery and will continue to be so until we shall have learned a great deal more about the civilization of our earliest forefathers than we know to-day. Could they write or couldn't they, and if they could write, what was the meaning of those strangely colored pebbles which we have found among the bones of their graveyards and in their caves?

The answer is that we do not know.

Almost every year we are told that now at last Professor So-and-So has succeeded in finding the key to this exasperating mystery. Then there is great rejoicing in the land of the learned, for now at last the history of the human race has been carried back another 10,000 or 15,000 years.But ere long there is doubt.Finally a careful examination of all the pros and cons shows us that there was nothing to the latest hypothesis and that we must begin all over again.

Of course, the people of the Middle Ages felt the same way about the hieroglyphics and the clay tablets of the Babylonians. Then came Thomas Young, Champollion and Rawlinson and to-day those who have learned the art can read cuneiform and ancient Egyptian as they can read their daily newspapers.

I have no doubt that some day the riddle will be solved. It may happen next year.It may come a hundred years from now.We don't know and so for the moment we are obliged to guess or say nothing at all.

We know from the researches made in the old caves of Spain and France that man began to draw pictures almost as soon as he began to make tools. Some of those pictures showed such great technical perfection that the archologists who reported their discovery were accused of having faked the whole gallery of mastodons and fishes and deer for the sake of gaining a little notoriety.Nowadays we know that these pictures were genuine and that we may expect to discover more and more of them as time goes by.

But what did they mean to the people who made them, and were they connected with a conscious attempt at putting abstract ideas into a concrete and imperishable form?

Most probably not.

They had to do with magic—with necromancy. People drew pictures of wild boars and elephants before they started out to hunt those creatures in the hope that they would be able to cast a spell over them and get hold of them with less effort, just as the potentates of the Middle Ages would make wax figures resembling their enemies and would then stick them full of pins.

Those prehistoric drawings therefore are not the remnants of an early form of picture language. They are expressions of the religious spirit of that day.They tell a story(as all pictures do)but they are not connected with man's desire to conserve his ideas in a concrete form.

Which brings us face to face with the next question:when did pictures cease to be mere pictures and when did they become part of a definite system of thought preservation?

A modern example will show you how difficult it is to draw the exact line between the two forms of pictorial expression. In Europe, by the side of many mountain roads, you will find small painted signs which have been erected for the purpose of giving the passer-by a concrete piece of abbreviated information.One of these two signs shows us the portrait of a saint.A wanderer(dead and buried these last five hundred years ago)was caught on this spot by a hurricane and the good saint saved his life.The grateful patient thought the event so important that he had a picture painted to tell all passers-by what happened during this supreme moment in his life.The second sign is merely an inverted letter S which has been erected by the local automobile club.Its meaning is clear to all those who drive cars.That inverted S shouts in unmistakable tones”“Be careful!You are fast approaching a dangerous curve.”

Both pictures tell a story. But one belongs to the sort of images out of which a written language was eventually developed.

How that happened I shall try to tell you with the help of another sketch.

Take this message of a hunter of the glacial period, scratched upon the sides of an overhanging rock. He has strayed away from his companions and suddenly he sees two deer away off in the distance, He wants to follow his quarry, but is too far away from the others to tell them so by word of mouth.He cannot reach them with his voice to say:“Hey there, listen!I have gone after two deer.”He must fied another way.So he draws a rude picture on the rock and this picture is really a letter which reads:“I have seen two deer near the lake and I am giving chase.Don't wait for me.I will come back.”

If the Bushmen(who were splendid artists and who have left us many pictures of this sort)had had occasion to send messages like that often enough, they might finally have developed a picture language in which every sign would have stood for a definite word which thus far had existed only in the spoken form. But mark the qualifying words of the last sentence:“If they had had occasion to send messages like that often enough!”

It was necessary for the same drawings to be repeated endlessly before any one would have hit upon the idea that such images could be used for the purpose of preserving the spoken word in a concrete pictorial form, and among a very simple people that was something that was not at all likely to occur. And so it happened that quite a number of primitive tribes came within an ace of inventing a written language and yet failed for lack of sufficient opportunity to study the problem.In their anxiety, they tried a number of schemes.On the American continent the Peruvian Indians developed a system of keeping tab on national affairs by means of little bits of colored string in which they made knots that had a definite meaning.The Chinese, who had time to do things thoroughly, worked out a complicated method consisting of tens of thousands of little pictures, each one of which represented a word or an entire idea.This was a step in the right direction, but it forced the intellectuals of that interesting nation to learn thirty or forty thousand small images by heart before they could say,“Yes, I can read and write a little.”

In short, the whole world was eagerly looking for a handy method to conserve the spoken word and no one was successful until the Egyptians appeared upon the scene. Whether the Egyptians had got their first hint of the possibility of such a thing from some other people of whom we have lost all track, that again it is impossible to tell.

Until we shall have gathered a little more concrete information about the mythical continent in the Atlantic which is mentioned in so many ancient books, credit for the first workable system of picture writing should undoubtedly go. to the subjects of the Pharaohs.But with them, writing remained what it had been in the beginning, a holy art to be practiced only by the initiated, by the priests.In the course of time a simpler form of picture writing grew up next to the officially recognized hieroglyphics.But for commercial and everyday purposes even this popular form of image writing was a little too complicated.It was not easy to learn them by heart and we might have been obliged to wait Heaven knows how long for our alphabet if it had not been for the Phnicians.

That those highway robbers who cared less than nothing for the arts should have given us one of the most useful inventions of all times may well seem one of those grim jokes of which history is so fond. But there is a perfectly good reason why they and not the Egyptians or the Babylonians should have been the first to think of this practical solution of the problem.

The Phnicians were business men. They needed a short and handy system of taking down agreements and contracts.The were obliged to send business letters to their representatives in the different settlements along the shores of the Mediterranean and could not waste time making pretty water-colors when they were talking of olive oil and Samothracian goatskins.And, being professional robbers, they borrowed some of the holy little pictures from their Egyptian customers, clipped them into short, stenographic symbols, added a few signs of their own making, stole a few others from those neighbors who were working upon the same problem and worked these lines and dots and pothooks into a system of speech-preservation which enabled them to catch practically every sound that escaped from the human mouth and put it down in a concrete and visible form for the future benefit of themselves and their descendants.

How this alphabet traveled from Phnicia to Greece, how the Romans remodeled these letters so that they could be engraved over the doors of their temples and around their triumphal arches, how the German tribes changed them in such a way that they could be cut into wood in the guise of runes, all this makes fascinating reading, but I have not the space to go into these entertaining details. Suffice it to say that to-day, with the help of our west-European alphabet, we can reproduce almost every sound of every language that is being spoken on our planet.The system is by no means perfect.Our alphabet might conveniently borrow a few letters from its Russian neighbor.But whatever the mouth speaketh, the hand can now preserve for all time.

Hence knowledge has become an imperishable commodity.

Hence we grow more and more learned every day.

Hence we may even hope that some day we shall also be wise.

Written language, being at heart a form of painting, depended for its success very much upon those materials upon which it was taken down.

The Egyptians had scribbled their hieroglyphics all over the walls of their graves and temples. But the tally sheets of Corinthian raisins and Attic laurel leaves sold by a merchant from Tyre to a jobber in Carthage demanded some other and less bulky substance for their perpetuation—something that could be put into a man's traveling-bag and carried on board a ship or packed away on the back of a mule.

Once again necessity proved herself the mother of invention. The Chinese, always a little ahead of the rest of the world, were responsible for the discovery of paper.They were the first to notice that one could make a substance suitable for drawing and writing purposes out of the fibrous matter of a number of plants.In the thirtieth century before the birth of Christ, the Egyptians followed their example and began to fabricate a substitute for temple walls and coffin-covers out of the papyrus plant which then grew all over the delta of the Nile.But the Phnicians, after their pleasant habit, grabbed that industry and the papy-rus-making business soon centered around the Phnician town of Gebal which the Greeks pronounced“Byblos.”The trade-name stuck.The town of Byblos has long since gone the way of most cities in the eastern Mediterranean, but the name of its chief article of export has survived and the holy books of the people of Europe are still named after the city which many centuries ago made the best sheets of papyrus, the best ropes and the best ship mats.

As for the paper which we ourselves use, the so-called ragpaper, that did not come to Europe until much later. It also was of Chinese origin and it reached the West by way of Samarkand, Arabia and Greece.From there it spread all over the world.It has steadily deteriorated during the last hundred years with the result that our modern books will probably last one tenth of the time of those printed two centuries ago.

Paper, however, was not enough for the purpose of preserving ideas in a concrete form. One also needs something with which to write down the signs that represent the different sounds.The Romans in their daily lives had contented themselves with little wax slates and a sort of copper burin.When Gar invited you to dinner, be sent the maid with a little slate.But for official purposes they used the Egyptian papyrus and a sort of ink.This sort of ink had come from Egypt and closely resembled paint.The Chinese had done still better by inventing a mixture of gum and charcoal which made nice black letters.But our poor friends of the early Middle Ages(the period when the artificial multiplication of our natural powers was regarded with deep suspicion)were forced to muddle along as best they could with strange fluids made out of iron-gall and pigments secreted by the cuttlefish, until the great revival of intellectual curiosity of the fifteenth century gave them not only a decent sort of ink but also the lead-pencil.

During those same years, writing ceased to be the prerogative of the learned and became one of the most popular of indoorsports for all the world. Everybody began to have ideas and felt that they should be preserved for posterity.So fast and furiously did people then begin to write that even the useful fountain-pen made its appearance and people began to search seriously for a substitute for the all too perishable goose-quill.They did not succeed in this quest until the beginning of the nineteenth century.But by that time the writing craze had attacked all the world and even the fast scribbling pen was found to be too slow to keep track of all the million things people wanted to tell each other.It was the age when the machine was beginning to do the work of the human hand, and it was felt that the business of writing should also be entrusted to a convenient little engine to release the aching fingers from the degrading necessity of uninterrupted pen-pushing.The typewriter was the answer to this cry of agony on the part of the white-collar brigade.Where formerly they wrote ten pages, they could now tick thirty.And as many extra copies as they liked.

A bad orchestra conductor can spoil a good composition in a variety of ways, but none of these is quite as fatal as the habit of placing the wrong accent upon the wrong note.

Historians are apt to make the same mistake. Not, because they mean badly but because since time immemorial they have been in the habit of repeating each other and have rarely taken the trouble to submit the ancient scores to a new interpretation.

There is the matter of the invention of printing. It made a deep impression upon the people of the fifteenth century, for to them it seemed to have come as a Godsend.Just when they were most eager to buy cheap books, the obliging Mr.Gensfieisch(Gooseflesh)provided them with a method of multiplying written texts that brought books within the reach of almost every one.Ever since the faithful historians have been praising Herr Gutenberg as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind, He derived little enough profit from his strenuous labors.

But the art of printing belonged to a category which we might call the unavoidable inventions. It was one of those multiplications of our natural powers that were sure to make their appearance as soon as there should be a sufficient demand for them.Therefore the man who, long before anybody else thought of it, began to worry his brain with the perplexing puzzle how to preserve ideas as if they had been so many sardines is the hero who ought to have the statues and the glory.While the man who merely transferred the tedious business of copying from the human hand to the mechanical hand deserves honorable mention, but very little else.

Because we do not know the name of the former, we never mention him.

What difference does it make who he was or where he lived or died?Can't we have a monument to the Unknown Scientist?

Since this chapter is not being written in praise of either the Mainz jeweler or the Haarlem sexton(his most dangerous rival for the honors of having been the first to print books from movable type),I can state briefly that the act of printing was a great deal older than we usually think.

The Chinese were the first to print pictures from wooden blocks. But whether their invention ever came to Europe and when(if at all),we don't know.In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, pictures of saints were regularly struck off from little blocks of wood upon which they had been previously engraved by some local artist who found that painting thousands of them by hand took too long.

With the increase of learning and the even more important revival of general business which took place during the fifteenth century, there was a demand not only for a rapid method of literary reproduction but especially for a cheap one. That is what Gutenberg and his fellow workers gave us, an inexpensive way of multiplying the written word.In proof whereof let me draw your attention to the first issue that came from his press.It was a business document, an Indulgence blank, a piece of paper arranged like an application for telephone service, something that was needed in hundreds of thousands of copies that would have cost a fortune if written by hand.

The printing-press has belied its origin. It is a sort of inky mouth, spewing forth information, instruction and entertainment, and like the human mouth it can utter words of wisdom and words of folly with equal case.

It is one of those inventions that will probably never be entirely discarded, but it will be relieved of many of its services by the invention of that veritable artificial mouth known as the radio.

Radio is so new that we cannot possibly predict what it will be able to do for us or what it will do to us. But it has reinstated the human mouth in all its former glory.The mouth, being a free agent(like the hand and the foot),may choose to talk nonsense.But that is neither here nor there.The main thing is that after forty centuries of inventions we seem to have returned to the point from which we started.

In the beginning, man imparted his own knowledge to his neighbors by means of his vocal cords.

Then he tried to reach them by way of the printed word.

Now once more he talks.

But whereas formerly he could address only a handful of fellow tribesmen, gathered around the village fire, he can now speak to millions—yes, theoretically at least, it is possible for him to speak unto every man, woman and child on this planet at one and the same moment.

No mean achievement, and one that gives us hope.

Now that more and more people are“listening in”whenever anything of importance is happening, it is quite possible that another form of augmented mouth, the newspaper, may at some future date go out of existence altogether.

In the beginning die newspaper was exactly what the name implies. Bits of information which were too important to be entrusted to the town-crier were printed on a piece of paper and were fastened outside a shop-window where the crowd could read them and perhaps buy a pound of tobacco so as to be able to discuss the events with the storekeeper.As the price of different commodities began to depend more and more upon political developments in different parts of the world, certain enterprising gazetteers maintained regular correspondents in the main centers of commerce and two or three times each week they collected whatsoever seemed to be of importance and sent it to their employers, who with the help of a small case of movable type, a pint of printer's ink and a press, shouted the information from the house tops by sending their“courant”to a few thousand of the more solvent members of society.

The few thousands have now grown into a few millions. But as there are never enough important events within a single day to fill sixty or seventy enormous pages with honest-to-goodness“news”the rest of the space is taken up by various attempts to entertain the same crowd which in the old and illiterate days derived its chief amusement from a public hanging or the drowning of a witch.

The present chapter is getting to be rather long but ere I finish I must speak of another invention connected with our eagerness to store up information in a permanent form.

A picture, as I have told you before, is merely a story told by means of lines and a few patches of color. When I dive to the bottom of the ocean and run across a new sort of fish, I can either tell the rest of the world of my discovery by making certain sounds, the meaning of which has become dear to nay hearers through long practice, or tell them by converting those sounds into small black and white symbols, neatly noted down upon a sheet of paper, which are understandable to all those who have been taught the meaning of those pictures, and finally I can take a pencil or a brush and draw a likeness of the prickly monster in such a way as to make others feel the exact impression the creature made upon me.

People knew that this could be done even before they found out that information could be retransmitted to the car as well as to the eye.

As a matter of fact, most children(and children are merely a species of savage until they are exposed to a little education)go through the story-drawing period several years before they reach the point where they can express anything in reading and writing. All mankind, in the days of its youth, resembled one vast nursery, the walls of which were covered with pictures.

The ancient world recognized the value of pictorial information to the fullest extent. The Greeks and Romans taught the art of reading and writing only to those who were supposed to have need of it, and who might be expected to usc their knowledge in an intelligent fashion.To force a peasant, who would never in his life either send or receive a letter, to spend five years of his childhood in a stuffy schoolroom that he might be able to spell his own name, would have struck those hard-headed rationalists as utter folly.They would just as lief have tried to explain the principles of musical composition to a deaf mute.

The Middle Ages thought likewise and those who could not be reached by word of mouth were told whatever they had to know by means of pictorial representations. But as the number of people who were to be taught increased and there was a greater and greater demand for stories about the fives of the saints and the valorous deeds of the ancestors, efforts were made to speed up the output of holy images by means of mechanical appliances.This led, as I have said before, to the discovery of block printing—a method by which two or three thousand pictures could be struck off from a single piece of wood.

But while this method would do very well as long as it remained confined to imaginary representations of more or less imaginary events, it was not quite as satisfactory when applied to scientific problems. No one could object to a wood-cut of the tower of Babel, as the guess of one artist about that legendary edifice was apt to be as good as that of the next.But a jellyfish in a bottle or the muscle of an arm had to be rendered exactly as they were or they would have been of no earthly use to students of Ctenophora and anatomy.

This led to a variety of experiments, all of which endeavored to relate animate and inanimate objects in a permanent pictorial fashion with greater precision than they could ever be described by telling about them either in print or by the living voice.

For a long time these experiments were brilliantly unsuccessful. With the help of mirrors mad lenses and dark rooms one could temporarily catch a landscape upon a piece of glass, but between“catching”and“keeping”that selfsame landscape there was after all a very painful difference and the moment the light was gone, the picture was lost.

But a little over a century ago, luck decided to take a hand in the game and show us poor patient mortals a way out of the difficulty. Two Frenchmen, Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niepce(the latter a universal genius who came within an ace of giving us a motor),had been working for quite a long time with a variety of chemical solutions, several of which made it possible for them to“catch”images on plates of glass but none of which seemed able to“preserve”these pictures once they had been taken.One day by the merest of chances, Daguerre left a few of his sensitive plates, which had already been exposed to the sunlight, in a cupboard in which there stood a bottle of mercury.To his surprise he found that something had happened to these plates which had never happened before.That was the beginning of a marvelous piece of chemical sleuthing which ended with the invention of the art of photography,“the an of drawing by means of light.”

From that moment on we were able to add precise graphic descriptions to stories that thus far had depended for their accuracy upon the none too reliable testimony of the spoken or written word.

The new art spread far and wide. It was acclaimed everywhere as a great step forward.The chemical industry which just then was graduating with high honors out of the laboratories of the ancient alchemists, came nobly to the assistance of the“light writers.”

Others invented machinery which could catch the subject that was to be“described”sitting still, running a race, being shot out of a cannon, or what-have-you. They perfected their moving picture cameras until they could tell pictures in“pictures”faster and better than any one could hope to tell them by means of mere“words,”whether spoken or printed.

When Edison, after endless experiments with mechanical contrivances that should catch and return the human voice, finally gave us his“phonograph”or“sound writer,”it was possible to combine“story telling”with“picture telling”in such a way that henceforth everything anybody ever said or did could be preserved in permanent form for an unlimited number of years.

We still have to learn a great many things and the scientific millennium is not exactly at hand.

But the human mouth, if I may mix my metaphors, can rest on its laurels.

It has multiplied its powers in such a way and so cleverly that for the purposes of information and misinformation, the human race to-day is one.