The Story of the Alphabet

by Edward Clodd

Excerpt from The Story of the Alphabet
If this little book does not supply a want, it fills, however imperfectly, a gap; for the only work in the English language on the subject - Canon Isaac Taylor's "History of the Alphabet" - is necessarily charged with a mass of technical detail which is stiff reading even for the student of graphiology. Moreover, invaluable and indispensable as is that work, it furnishes only a meagre account of those primitive stages of the art of writing, knowledge of which is essential for tracing the development of that art, so that its place in the general evolution of human inventions is made clear. Prominence is therefore given to this branch of the subject in the following pages.
In the recent reprint of Canon Taylor's book no reference occurs to the important materials collected by Professor Flinders Petrie and Mr. Arthur J. Evans in Egypt and Crete, the result of which is to revolutionise the old theory of the source of the Alphabet whence our own and others are derived. This opens up a big question for experts to settle; and here it must suffice to present a statement of the new evidence, and to point out its significance, so that the reader be not taken into the troubled atmosphere of controversy. That he may, further, not be distracted by footnotes, references to the authorities cited are printed in the text.
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Genres: History

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1900

About the author

In 1840, Edward Clodd was born in England. Although his parents wanted him to become a Baptist minister, Clodd went into banking, working as secretary of the London Joint Stock Bank from 1872-1915. An early Darwin aficionado, the largely self-educated writer set about to make rationalism and science accessible to the masses. In 1872, he wrote Childhood of the World. His influential evolution manual, Story of Creation, was reprinted many times. Clodd worked with the Rationalist Press Association, and delivered the Conway Memorial Lecture in 1910 on "Gibbon and Christianity." His other works include Memories (1916) and The Question: If a Man Die, Shall he Live Again?" (1917).

Clodd was an early follower of the work of Charles Darwin and had personal acquaintance with Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. He wrote biographies of all three men, and worked to popularise evolution through books like The Childhood of the World and The Story of Creation: A Plain Account of Evolution.

Clodd was an agnostic and wrote that the Genesis creation narrative of the Bible is similar to other religious myths and should not be read as a literal account. He wrote many popular books on evolutionary science. He wrote a biography of Thomas Henry Huxley and was a lecturer and popularizer of anthropology and evolution.

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