18.  Some, however, seem willing to think writing coeval with speech.  Thus Bicknell, from Martin’s Physico-Grammatical Essay:  “We are told by Moses, that Adam gave names to every living creature;[23] but how those names were written, or what sort of characters he made use of, is not known to us; nor indeed whether Adam ever made use of a written language at all; since we find no mention made of any in the sacred history.”—­Bicknell’s Gram., Part ii, p. 5.  A certain late writer on English grammar, with admirable flippancy, cuts this matter short, as follows,—­satisfying himself with pronouncing all speech to be natural, and all writing artificial:  “Of how many primary kinds is language?  It is of two kinds; natural or spoken, and artificial or written.”—­Oliver B. Peirce’s Gram., p. 15.  “Natural language is, to a limited extent, (the representation of the passions,) common to brutes as well as man; but artificial language, being the work of invention, is peculiar to man.”—­Ib., p. 16.[24]

19.  The writings delivered to the Israelites by Moses, are more ancient than any others now known.  In the thirty-first chapter of Exodus, it is said, that God “gave unto Moses, upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”  And again, in the thirty-second:  “The tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.”  But these divine testimonies, thus miraculously written, do not appear to have been the first writing; for Moses had been previously commanded to write an account of the victory over Amalek, “for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua.”—­Exod., xvii, 14.  This first battle of the Israelites occurred in Rephidim, a place on the east side of the western gulf of the Red Sea, at or near Horeb, but before they came to Sinai, upon the top of which, (on the fiftieth day after their departure from Egypt,) Moses received the ten commandments of the law.

20.  Some authors, however, among whom is Dr. Adam Clarke, suppose that in this instance the order of the events is not to be inferred from the order of the record, or that there is room to doubt whether the use of letters was here intended; and that there consequently remains a strong probability, that the sacred Decalogue, which God himself delivered to Moses on Sinai, A. M. 2513, B. C. 1491, was “the first writing in alphabetical characters ever exhibited to the world.”  See Clarke’s Succession of Sacred Literature, Vol. i, p. 24.  Dr. Scott, in his General Preface to the Bible, seems likewise to favour the same opinion.  “Indeed,” says he, “there is some probability in the opinion, that the art of writing was first communicated by revelation, to Moses, in order to perpetuate, with certainty, those facts, truths, and laws, which he was employed to deliver to Israel.  Learned men find no traces of literary, or alphabetical,