By Hepworth Dixon.

1. The history of those discoveries in science, by the application of which human power is increased, and the progress of the race accelerated - at least in one direction - is always interesting to those whose look is forward. The improvements in the means of intellectual advancement are peculiarly so; and of these, language, and the modes of its communication, are in every respect the most significant and important. Without these arts, it is fearful to think what would have been the condition of the world. As the instrument of all thought - the medium of all science, language is not only an essential to civilization, but its basis. Without a system of intercommunication, indefinitely expansive and improvable, the progress of the race would be impossible. To be lasting, improvement must be equable and uniform.

2. The history of language, and the modes of its representation is the history of civilization. The different stages through which these arts have passed, have made the grand epochs of history. The invention of writing, or the Egyptian method of symbolising thought, - the discovery of the alphabetic system, or sound writing, which the Hellenes perfected, (so far as it has been perfected,) - and the adaptation of movable types to the purposes of printing, mark the three grandest eras of merely human endeavor for advancement - eras infinitely more important, and. to healthy minds, more historic and imposing, than those indicated in the track of the past by conquests and their attendant sufferings.

3. A period must have existed when the art of writing was entirely unknown. This is the case at some of the South Sea islands in our own day. The missionary Williams describes the perplexity and astonishment of the natives, at his writing some black lines on a bit of chip, and sending them to his wife, who thereon returned him some tools which he

had requested. The power of endowing a chip with intelligence, struck them with awe. They at once ascribed it to supernatural agency. And however simple and common-place this process seems to one nurtured in the high civilization of Europe, it was probably the most wonderful evidence of the missionary's superiority to the uncultivated aborigines which he could have displayed. But if this faculty of talking to his family at the distance of a mile, excited their curiosity and reverence for his superior power, what would they think of a man conversing with his friends in England - as would certainly be possible through the electric telegraph, were one laid down - thousands of miles away, through a bit of wire? Like the Pre-Assyrian nations of antiquity, the islanders possess no means of transmitting a message, except verbally. The difference between their condition and ours, is the a-mount of progress made in the art of writing, and the mode of its communication from a period little antecedent to the age of Homer down to ours. "We may notice that contrivances were adopted for a more speedy transmission of intelligence than by the fleetest couriers, long before the dawn of the historical period. Fire signals were used by the Hellenes in the earliest times. One of the grandest of the Greek tragedies opens with a scene on a watch tower, occupied by a watcher whose eyes are directed towards the beleagured IIion - from which a chain of signals on the mountain heights had been prepared. He had strained his sight in vain for ten long years. At length the long expected signal appears. It is night; and the ruddy flame shoots up against the dark sky and the black summits of the mountains beyond - and the important announcement is made, that Troy has fallen. With some modification, the fire signal continued in use until a comparatively recent period. England is covered with emi-nences which are crowned with the remains of ancient beacons, or with traditions of their existence there in the middle age. But this method was exceedingly inartificial in character, and vague and general in expression. Only one idea could be so transmitted - and that only according to a previous arrangement. The sign and its signification had to be determined

beforehand; a thing possible only with an event long expected, and to which the general attention was pointed. Subsequently, rockets came into use. Their number introduced a new element into the system - for the moment the signal became complex, expressing more'than one idea, it became a system. The problem was, to make the signal explain itself on the instant, so that sudden and unexpected events might be communicated by it. The Semaphore, and other modern contrivances, in part realized this: but they were still comparatively slow in operation; and were, moreover, subject to stoppage at night and in dark weather, and to other disadvantages. The electric telegraph is wonderfully free from all the ordinary impediments. It can be worked in shine or shade - at night or day - with equal certainty. Of all the modes of communicating the symbols of thought, it is at once the cheapest, the most rapid, and the most unerring. In the future, it may perhaps supersede postal correspondence to a very considerable extent. Instead of writing letters, men of business, distant friends, or others, may resort at stated times to the termini of the electric wires, and signalling to each other, write their thoughts, and get answers in a space of time incredibly short. It is inconceivable, and certainly unnecessary, that mankind should ever discover a swifter channel of communication than this: would that all their powers, moral, intellectual, and material, were co-ordinated with it!

4. Such is the progress made in the art of transmitting the symbols of ideas in about three thousand years - from the fire signal to the electric telegraph! Let us now see what we have done in the other division of the art - that of perfecting the symbols.