achievement of a long series of improvements in the art of
writing. The precise steps that marked this path of intellectual
development can for the most part be known only by inference; yet
it is probable that the main chapters of the story may be
reproduced with essential accuracy.


FIRST STEPS

For the very first chapters of the story we must go back in
imagination to the prehistoric period. Even barbaric man feels
the need of self-expression, and strives to make his ideas
manifest to other men by pictorial signs. The cave-dwellers
scratched pictures of men and animals on the surface of a
reindeer horn or mammoth tusk as mementos of his prowess. The
American Indian does essentially the same thing to-day, making
pictures that crudely record his successes in war and the chase.
The Northern Indian had got no farther than this when the white
man discovered America; but the Aztecs of the Southwest and the
Maya people of Yucatan had carried their picture- making to a
much higher state of elaboration.[3] They had developed systems
of pictographs or hieroglyphics that would doubtless in the
course of generations have been elaborated into alphabetical
systems, had not the Europeans cut off the civilization of which
they were the highest exponents.

What the Aztec and Maya were striving towards in the sixteenth
century A.D., various Oriental nations had attained at least five
or six thousand years earlier. In Egypt at the time of the
pyramid-builders, and in Babylonia at the same epoch, the people