Perhaps, by this time, you are beginning to see how very slowly alphabets have grown, and how hard it has been for human beings to perfect them. Knowing this, will you not look now with more interest on written and printed words? When you see letters, will you not reflect what a history each one has, reaching far back into the remotest past, where at first all seems dark, and where, when light does come, the very number and variety of materials perplex the student of alphabets? Moreover, will you not feel ashamed of people who laugh or sneer at savage nations who have no sound-writing, no syllabary, no alphabet? It does not mean that in such races all men are stupid. As a rule it means simply that the race has not had a fair chance. It has been racked by wars. Or it has never come in contact peacefully with some nation that used a method of writing a trifle better than its own, so that the brighter minds could establish schools of learning. When one nation conquers another, the higher and cleverer minds among the conquered are often the first to be destroyed. The best of our Indians of North and South America seem to have been the first to fall in battle with the whites, or to have died off because of their cruelty. The reason why the others, who lived with or near the white settlers, did not readily borrow our way of writing in their turn, as we had borrowed from the Romans, the Romans from the Greeks and Phoenicians, and the latter from the Egyptians, seems to be that our system was too far advanced for them. But if the first white settlers in Central and South America had been kind and wise men, instead of coarse and greedy people, they could have found tribes and nations almost as advanced in their mode of writing as the Japanese, though not the equals of the Japanese in architecture and the fine arts. These tribes could have learned our alphabet if care had been taken to instruct their superior men. It is certain that the Aztecs, or Mexican Indians, had advanced very far on the road to a true alphabet. When the cruel Spaniards arrived and upset their governments, destroyed their temples, massacred, enslaved and then shamefully neglected them, they had already reached the art of rebus-writing. The name of the Mexican King, Knife-Snake, or, Itz-Coatl was written in this way: Itzli means knives, and Coatl, snake. There, in Fig. 1, is the snake, and on his back are knives made of flint. They even went farther. The same name, Itz-Coatl, was also written as in Fig. 2. The flint-headed arrow means _Itz_; the jar, called _Comitl_, stands for _Co_; and the branch, a picture of water in drops, stands for _atl_, water. And it has been asserted that certain neighbors of the Aztecs or Mexicans, known as the Maya Indians of Yucatan, who were ancient people of Central America, left ruins of cities covering square miles of forest and plain, and had reached nearly if not quite to the invention of an alphabet of vowels and consonants. But the latest authorities agree that such a Maya alphabet as the Spaniards reported may have been invented after the whites arrived. Specimens of Maya writing may be seen in Washington, at the Smithsonian Institute, on slabs and on paper casts taken from their idols or statues of kings and priests. It was not by the Maya system, but by one of rebuses, that the old missionaries wrote what few books they composed for their unhappy Indian congregations. Only lately a book composed in picture-writing throughout, was printed for the Mikmak Indians of Newfoundland.