SCIENCE AND SURMISE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19660, 11 June 1927, Page 5 (Supplement)

SCIENCE AND SURMISE.

NEW FACTS AND THEORIES. BX F&ANK H. BODLE. There are three or four outstanding landmarks of human progress that have made possible the advance from savagery to civilisation. Among these may be mentioned the mastery of fire, the birth of agriculture, the invention of metalworkijig and finally the alphabet. Take all these thing's away and you have a people far below the culture level of the Australian blacks. Of those who first used and developed these key-inventions, we know extraordinarily little. The alphabet, which, from its very nature, should be. the least difficult to trace, is as much a mystery as anv of the others. All writing had its origin in pjctO' grams, pictures that conveyed ideas. Then came the great step;—described by Dr. Taylor, the authority on the alphabet, as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind—the advance from picture writing to sound signs. To us it would seem a very simple and obvious advance, but that is not so, for only one people achieved this. All alphabets are clearly related and must trace to one parent source. The change from piqtura to phonetic writing could not be a matter of slow evolution—there is here something radical, something revolutionary. Thus the idoa behind the alphabet was in all probability the work of some individual genius, who with association, developed the idea, using the existing picture signs as the basis for their sound symbols. This revolution took place so -very long ago that the earliest known alphabets had already, through use, lost all bat the very faintest traces of their pictorial origin. TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT. It has been EFie custom to ascribe our alphabet to the Phoenicians, but this is not correct, indeed it is denied by the Phoenicians themselves. These old seatraders ascribed the invention to an older race from whom they received it. There are two main schools of thought in regart} to this unknown race. By gome it is held that the first alphabet was developed in Egypt. Another party favours Crete, or the relatives of the early Cretans, the much-maligned Philistines. In old Egypt, there were two types of writing, the better-known hieroglyphs and hieratic Egyptian, a true phoentic alphabet, the ancient priestly writing, whose secret

was closely guarded in the temples. Qpite clearly this latter script is of common stock with the other Mediterranean alphabets, many of the symbols being the same or very similar. The oldest real writing, that is known is of this sort—the Papyrus Prisse, at least 5500 years old—and is now in the Berlin Museum. This Egyptian form of our alphabet is so ancient that it fell into disuse in Egypt and was forgotten at least 3250 years ago. Excavations in Crete have also revealed an archaic form of the alphabet which is clearly related to the letters we use to-day. It is curious that the only other section where the use of a phonetic alphabet should have developed, even partially, is in Central America. The Mayas carved many inscriptions, which have yet to bo fully translated and though some of the signs are hieroglyphs, a sign representing a word, vit is generally held that others are true phonetic signs. I'he most recent expedition to Mayaland, sought, in the scene of the first Spanish settlement, to find a bi-lingual manuscript or inscription, which like the famous Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon's engineers in Egypt, would/ open the door of knowledge on the writings of a mysterious race. The expedition was unsuccessful. At the present time archaeologists are working on the inscribed tablets found near Vichy in France, the earliest known European writing, but no announcement has yet been made in regard to the nature of the inscriptions, it is not- impossible that there may be some connection between these and other known alphabets, for peoples of the Mediterranean race clearly penetrated far into France. It will bo seen that our knowledge of the origin of the alphabet is very limited. All that the. most competent authorities can suggest is that it may have been developed perhaps 8000 years ago, or even more remotely, from earlier picture writing, perhaps in the Egvpt of that day, perhaps in Crete or elsewhere in* the Mediterranean basin. We know as little about its as we do of the capture of fire, who farst worked the metals or tilled tho soiL ANT-EATER'S RICH MILK. The echidna, that queer Australian porcupine ant-eater that lays eggs and then hatches them in a pouch has recently had its milk analysed—it is one of tho lowest types of mammals—with the surprising result that it has been showi to contain nearlv 20 per cent, of fat, five times as much as the average cow. Alio porpoise, with 45 per cent, fat, beats this and the elephant, with 19.5 per cent, fat, is very close, but these are much richer than all others, rabbit's milk with 13.5 per cent, coming next. Mare's milk, 1.20 per cent, and asses, 1.6 per cent, are least rich in fat. Contrary to general belief, goat's milk, 4.6 per cent., is not so rich as that of a Jersey cow. The sheep, 6.8 per cent., the buffalo, 7.4 per cent., and the dog, 9.5 per cent., are all higher testing as regards fat percentage in their miikri