thought that the children would be unwilling to work hard and try to
remember because everything could be written down and they would not
need to use their memories. The Egyptians at first used pictures to
put their words upon rocks or paper, and even after they made several
letters of the alphabet their writing seemed like a mixture of little
pictures and queer marks.

[Illustration: Cleopatra EGYPTIAN PHONETIC WRITING]

OLD AND NEW INVENTIONS. Those who first discover how to make things
are called inventors, and what they make are called inventions. Now if
we should write out a list of the most useful inventions, we could
place in one column the inventions which were made before the days of
Columbus and in another those which have been made since. With this
list before us we may ask which inventions we could live without and
which we could not spare unless we were willing to become like the
savages. We should find that a large number of the inventions which we
use every day belong to the set of things older than Columbus. This is
another reason why, if we wish to understand our ways of living and
working, we must ask about the history of the countries where our
forefathers lived. It is the beginning of our own history.

[Illustration: Phoenician Early Greek Early Latin English
GROWTH OF LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET]

A PLAN OF STUDY. The discovery of America was made in 1492, at the
beginning of what we call Modern Times. Before Modern Times were the
Middle Ages, lasting about a thousand years. These began three or four
hundred years after the time of Christ or what we call the beginning
of the Christian Era. All the events that took place earlier we say