But man, the Thinker, began to develop and he began to have ideas about things which he could not see and hear and touch and taste and smell. He began to think of abstract ideas such as light and darkness, love and hate, and if he was to have written speech he must have symbols which would express these ideas. So we have found that he used pictures of the things he perceived with his five senses to symbolize some of his abstract ideas, as for example; a picture of the sun and moon to represent light; the bee to symbolize industry; the ostrich feather to represent justice. But as his ideas began to develop you can readily see that in the course of time there were not enough symbols to go around and this sort of written speech became very confusing and very difficult to read.

Necessity is truly the mother of invention, and so this need of man forced him to invent something entirely new—something which had been undreamed of before. He began now to use pictures which were different in sense but the names of which had the same sound. You can find an example of this same thing on the Children's Puzzle Page in the rebus which is given for the children to solve. As for example: A picture of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose and a berry, and this would stand for the sentence, I saw a boy swallow a gooseberry.

Perhaps you have used the same idea in some guessing game where a mill, a walk and a key stands for Milwaukee. And so we have a new form of picture writing. Notice in this that an entirely new idea has entered in, for the picture may not stand for the whole word but may stand for one syllable of the word as in the example given above. The mill stands for one syllable, walk for another and key for another. This was a great step for it meant the division of the word into various sounds represented by the syllables.

What a new insight it gives us into life when we realize that not only our bodies but the environment in which we live, the machines with which we work and even the language which we use has been a product of man's own effort. Man has developed these things for himself through a constant and steady evolution. It makes us feel that we are part of one stupendous whole; we belong to the class which has done the work of the world and accomplished these mighty things. The same blood flows in us; the same power belongs to us. Truly, with this idea, we can stand erect and look the whole world in the face and demand the opportunity to live our own lives to the full.

Yours for Freedom,

THE PEOPLE'S COLLEGE.

WORDS ADDED TO VERBS

279. We have just finished the study of adjectives and we have found that adjectives are words added to nouns to qualify or to limit their meaning. Without this class of words it would be impossible for us to express all of our ideas, for we would be at a loss to describe the objects about us. Adjectives enable us to name the qualities or tell the number of the objects with which we come in contact.

The verb, we have found, expresses the action of these objects; in other words, the verb tells what things do. So with adjectives and verbs we can describe the objects named by the nouns and tell what they do. For example, I may say, Men work. Here I have used simply a noun and a verb; then I may add various adjectives to this and say, Strong, industrious, ambitious men work. By the use of these adjectives, I have told you about the kind of men who work; but I have said nothing about the action expressed in the verb work. I may want to tell you how they work and when they work; where they work and how much; in other words, describe fully the action expressed in the verb work, so I say: