chosen as names for letters derived from some extraneous source, such names having the proper initial letter, and also some suitability to describe its shape-the same as if in English we called A-Arch or Arrowhead. C-Curve or Crescent. This, however, is contrary to all analogy among methods of writing of which we know the development, and moreover, several of the names of the Hebrew letters are not actual words in common use in the Hebrew writings, but words which have become obsolete, and of which in one or two cases it is hard to recover the meaning. The letters, moreover, cannot originally have been mere arbitrary signs, or there would have been greater distinctions between some of them, such as it was subsequently found desirable to introduce. If too, the Phoenician letters came from an extraneous source, we may well ask where it was, and how does it happen that no traces of the original names of the letters have been preserved. In the Greek alphabet, which is undoubtedly derivative, the names of the letters would alone suffice to show the source from which it came; and the case of the Runic alphabet, derived from the same source, though with the letters rearranged and with new names given at a comparatively recent date, seems hardly to apply. The Runic names, moreover, exhibit no attempt to denote the forms of the letters, to which they are as inapplicable as the names in one of the Irish alphabets, in which each letter is called by the name of some tree. It seems, on the contrary, far more probable that the Phoenicians, possibly in the first instance borrowing the idea from the Egyptians, struck out for themselves a more purely literal and therefore a more simple and useful alphabet. A classification of sounds once established, and a system of syllabic symbols once invented, the transition to a pure literal alphabet is comparatively easy, especially when once the syllabic symbols have, from the introduction of foreign words or from other causes, been employed for the initial sound only of the syllables they represent. Such a change, involving a departure from old practice, might perhaps more readily take place in an adjacent country to that in which the syllabic system prevailed, than in the country itself; and we may readily conceive a practical people like the Phoenicians importing from Egypt a system of pictorial writing thus modified. Certainly their alphabet, unlike the letters of the later class of Egyptian hieroglyphics, does not appear to consist of merely a few survivors from a whole army of symbols. On the contrary, it seems to present some traces of arrangement; for the objects representing the letters appear to be grouped in pairs, each comprising two objects in some manner associated with each other; and between each pair is inserted a third letter, represented by an object not so immediately connected with those preceding it, but still not absolutely alien from them. Thus the ox and the house are followed by the camel-an animal, by the way, not represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The door and the window are followed by the peg; the weapon and enclosure by the serpent; the hand and the palm by the ox-goad; the water and the fish by the support; the eye and the mouth by the reaping-hook; the head and the back of the head by the tooth; and the alphabet concludes with the final mark, X. It would be superfluous to attempt to point out the bearings of this question of the origin and development of the Phoenician alphabet on the history of civilization in Europe and Western Asia. Future discoveries may possibly bring us nearer the cradle of this alphabet, but it seems probable that on the Moabite stone we find the letters still retaining enough of their original pictorial character to justify a belief that they there occur in a comparatively early stage, and not removed by many centuries from the time when they were merely delineations of the objects, the names of which they have preserved. Assuming this to have been the case, what is the stage of culture to which the inventors of this alphabet appear to have attained? They were not mere nomads or hunters, but a people with fixed dwellings for themselves and enclosures for their cattle. They were acquainted with agriculture, and had domesticated animals, and employed the ox as a beast of draught to cultivate fields, the produce of which they reaped with metallic sickles. In fact, their civilization would seem to have been at least equal to that of the bronze-using people of the Swiss lake-dwellings. [J. E.] WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, March 22, 1872. SIR HENRY HOLLAND, Bart. M.D. D.C.L. F.R.S. President, J. NORMAN LOCKYER, Esq. F.R.S. M.R.I. On the Results of the latest Eclipse-Expedition. [Abstract deferred.] GENERAL MONTHLY MEETING, Monday, April 1, 1872. Sir HENRY HOLLAND, Bart. M.D. D.C.L. President, in the Chair. Louisa Lady Ashburton, Mrs. W. Clement Cazalet, Francis Halhed Ward-Jackson, Esq. Samuel Morley, Esq. M.P. S. J. Smith, Esq. F.G.S. F.C.S. were elected Members of the Royal Institution. The following Address of Congratulation to Her Majesty the Queen, to be signed by the President on behalf of the Members, was read and approved by the Meeting. 66 MADAM, "To THE QUEEN'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. "We Your Majesty's most dutiful subjects, the President, Managers, Visitors, Professors, and Members of the ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN for the Promotion, Diffusion, and Extension of Science and Useful Knowledge, humbly offer our heartfelt congratulations to Your Majesty on the Recovery of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales from His dangerous illness, which caused such universal and intense anxiety; and we desire to express our earnest wish, that the valuable life of His Royal Highness may be long preserved for the happiness of Your Majesty and His family, and for the lasting benefit of the nation." The PRESENTS received since the last Meeting were laid on the table, and the thanks of the Members returned for the same, viz.: FROM Governor-General of India-Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India :- Records, Vol. IV. 3, 4. 8vo. 1871. W. T. Blanford, Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia. 8vo. 1871. Director of the Geological Survey-Mineral Statistics for 1870. 8vo. 1872. Astronomical Society, Royal-Monthly Notices, Vol. XXXII. Nos. 3, 4. 1872. British Architects, Royal Institute of-Sessional Papers, 1871-2. Nos. 6, 7. 4to. British Museum Trustees-Guide to Greek Coins. 8vo. 1872. Pharmaceutical Journal for March, 1872. 8vo. Geographical Society, Royal-Proceedings, Vol. XV. No. 5. Vol. XVI. No. 2. 8vo. 1871-2. Hayden, F. V. Esq. (the Author)-Hot Springs and Geysers of the Yellow-stone and Firehole Rivers (from American Journal of Science, Vol. III. 1872). Linnean Society-Journal, No. 66. 8vo. 1872. London Institution-Journal, No. 11. 8vo. 1872. Macpherson, John, M.D. M.R.I. (the Author)-Annals of Cholera, from the earliest period to the year 1817. 8vo. 1872. Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society-Proceedings. Vol. XI. No. 10. 8vo. 1872. Meteorological Society-Quarterly Journal, New Series, No. 1. 8vo. 1872. Nichols, J. Gough, Esq. F.S.A. (the Author)-On the three editions of Watson's Memoirs of the ancient Earls of Warren and Surrey. (From Herald and Genealogist.) 8vo. 1872. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften-Monatsberichte, Dec. 1871. 8vo. Royal Society of Literature-Transactions, Second Series, Vol. X. Part 1. 8vo. 1872. Royal Society of London-Proceedings, No. 132. 8vo. 1872. Philosophical Transactions for 1871, Part 2. 4to. -1872. St. Petersbourg, Académie Impériale des Sciences-Mémoires, Tome XVI. Nos. 9–14. Tome XVII. Nos. 1-9. 4to. 1870-1. Bulletins, Tome XVI. Nos. 2-6. 4to. 1871. Symons, G. J. Esq. (the Author)-Symons' Monthly Meteorological Magazine, March. 1872. 8vo. Victoria Institute-Journal of Transactions, Vol. V. No. 20. 8vo. 1872. Wurzburg Physikal.-Medecin. Gesellschaft-Verhandlungen, Band I. Band II. Heft 1-2. 8vo. 1871. WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, SIR HENRY HOLLAND, Bart. M.D. D.C.L. F.R.S. President, in the Chair. JOHN MORLEY, Esq. On the Influence of Rousseau. ROUSSEAU'S teaching sowed the seeds of the restlessness which is so manifest throughout modern Europe. The teaching itself was not in its fundamental ideas possessed of great creative originality. Rousseau owed much to Geneva, where he was born, in the midst of public discontents and the discussion of the first principles of politics and theology: for instance, the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples, and the ten dency towards natural religion and a pure deism. He owed much to Montaigne, Plutarch, Hobbes, and Locke. His originality lay in the temper and sentiment which he introduced into social discussions, and which exactly suited the ripeness of the times. Until his memorable diversion, the battle between the old and new in France had been between the Church and the Encyclopædists or Voltaireans. The latter were rationalistic, critical, argumentative, believing enthusiastically in progress by means of new intellectual acquisitions. Rousseau sided with neither school, having no taste for dogmatic authority on the one hand, nor for mere knowledge or controversy on the other. His influence took root in a new type of life, springing from the old appeal away from the corruption and frivolity of artificial society, to simple and pure individual life; dogma being abandoned for spiritual theism, and pride of intellect for health of feeling. Hence his writings enlarged the attack which the philosophers had carefully restricted to the Church and theology, so as to comprehend the whole social order in destructive criticism. They touched the entire circle of life, and hence they inspired not only the Jacobin Robespierre, or the transcendental deist, George Sand, but the royalist Châteaubriand and the Christian Lamennais. They produced ultimately a magnificent expansion of the literature of imagination. But if Rousseau had confined himself to the presentation of a moral idea, his work would have taken a place with the other Utopian visions by which men have been cheered and elevated. He proceeded from man to the milieu, from the consideration of the right type of manhood and the means by which we are to be prepared for the right type of life, to the conditions of society. It was his method in the latter aspect which has made him so mischievous. He cut off the whole past of the race, obliterating history from memory and the old social ordering from sight, and inundating the study of social truth with metaphysical a priori figments, such as, Rights of Man, Laws of Nature, and the rest. The revolutionary dogma of the equality of man, of the equality of material condition, were both involved in his conception, though with respect to equality of material condition he did not insist on it from any exaltation of the material side of life; on the contrary, his notion of democracy was truly spiritualistic, and had its root in a moral revolt. His fundamental merit was his protest against the stationary fatalism of those who exaggerate the strength of social continuity and the grip of the past over the present. His fatal error was his disregard of the intellectual and moral endeavour of the past, and a blind ignorance of the experience of the race. What made his errors so baneful was the concurrence of the economic and political conditions of France, which were so devoid of all coherence as to permit his anti-social speculations to become violent explosive forces. He deserves, however, the gratitude of mankind for the impulse which he gave to the motives for the study of social truth, by pointing out how short a way we have gone towards the admission of the bondsmen of society to the best advantages of civilization. [J. M.] |