16.  Language is either oral or written; the question of its origin has consequently two parts.  Having suggested what seemed necessary respecting the origin of speech, I now proceed to that of writing.  Sheridan says, “We have in use two kinds of language, the spoken and the written:  the one, the gift of God; the other, the invention of man.”—­Elocution, p. xiv.  If this ascription of the two things to their sources, were as just as it is clear and emphatical, both parts of our question would seem to be resolved.  But this great rhetorician either forgot his own doctrine, or did not mean what he here says.  For he afterwards makes the former kind of language as much a work of art, as any one will suppose the latter to have been.  In his sixth lecture, he comments on the gift of speech thus:  “But still we are to observe, that nature did no more than furnish the power and means; she did not give the language, as in the case of the passions, but left it to the industry of men, to find out and agree upon such articulate sounds, as they should choose to make the symbols of their ideas.”—­Ib., p. 147.  He even goes farther, and supposes certain tones of the voice to be things invented by man:  “Accordingly, as she did not furnish the words, which were to be the symbols of his ideas; neither did she furnish the tones, which were to manifest, and communicate by their own virtue, the internal exertions and emotions, of such of his nobler faculties, as chiefly distinguish him from the brute species; but left them also, like words, to the care and invention of man.”—­Ibidem.  On this branch of the subject, enough has already been presented.

17.  By most authors, alphabetic writing is not only considered an artificial invention, but supposed to have been wholly unknown in the early ages of the world.  Its antiquity, however, is great.  Of this art, in which the science of grammar originated, we are not able to trace the commencement.  Different nations have claimed the honour of the invention; and it is not decided, among the learned, to whom, or to what country, it belongs.  It probably originated in Egypt.  For, “The Egyptians,” it is said, “paid divine honours to the Inventor of Letters, whom they called Theuth:  and Socrates, when he speaks of him, considers him as a god, or a god-like man.”—­British Gram., p. 32.  Charles Bucke has it, “That the first inventor of letters is supposed to have been Memnon; who was, in consequence, fabled to be the son of Aurora, goddess of the morning.”—­Bucke’s Classical Gram., p. 5.  The ancients in general seem to have thought Phoenicia the birthplace of Letters: 

“Phoenicians first, if ancient fame be true,
The sacred mystery of letters knew;
They first, by sound, in various lines design’d,
Express’d the meaning of the thinking mind;
The power of words by figures rude conveyed,
And useful science everlasting made.”

                                                Rowe’s Lucan, B. iii, l. 334.