But this great rhetorician either forgot his own doctrine, or did not mean what he here says.

For he afterwards makes the former kind of language as much a work of art, as any one will suppose the latter to have been.

In his sixth lecture, he comments on the gift of speech thus: "But still we are to observe, that nature did no more than furnish the power and means; _she did not give the language_, as in the case of the passions, but left it to the industry of men, to find out and agree upon such articulate sounds, as they should choose to make the symbols of their ideas."-- _Ib._, p.147.He even goes farther, and supposes certain _tones of the voice_ to be things invented by man: "Accordingly, as she did not furnish the _words_, which were to be the symbols of his ideas; neither did she furnish the _tones_, which were to manifest, and communicate by their own virtue, the internal exertions and emotions, of such of his nobler faculties, as chiefly distinguish him from the brute species; but left them also, like words, to the care and invention of man."-- _Ibidem_.

On this branch of the subject, enough has already been presented.
17.

By most authors, alphabetic writing is not only considered an artificial invention, but supposed to have been wholly unknown in the early ages of the world.