that the Irish have not merely culled letters out of the Roman alphabet and given them the names of trees: for although the examples of similarities are now become oddly and unsystematically arranged, yet their present situation can have arisen from nothing but an original identity, destroyed by various accidents. If the Ailm have nothing to do with the Aleph, it is evidently the same as the English Elm; and if the Beth or Beith has little or nothing to do with the English Birch, it is evidently identical with the Hebrew Beth. How came an Irish tree to bear the name of a Hebrew letter? Thus again, the Jod, Iod, Iota, Jodha, and Yew, are all nearly allied, and the Jod and Jodha identical. Again, how came this Irish name of a tree and a letter of their alphabet to be the same as the Hebrew name of this letter? Can any one look at the Greek Mu, the Irish Muin, and the English vine, and not be convinced (all the other letters and circumstances considered) that they are the same? Vine is evidently the three last letters of the Irish Muin.
75. The Irish name of the Ash, Nuin, is the same as the Hebrew and Samaritan Nun and the Greek Nu.
76. Lastly, the Samaritan and Hebrew Resh is unquestionably the Irish Ruis, the Elder. Again I ask, how came these Hebrew letters to bear the name of Irish trees? Did the Irish literati understand Hebrew several thousand years ago, and call their trees after Hebrew and Samaritan letters on purpose to puzzle the learned men of the present day? There is no way of accounting for these extraordinary coincidences and circumstances except by supposing an original alphabet called after trees, and changed by accident in long periods of time. Bigots may ridicule this, but they cannot refute it.
77. It is a singular circumstance, that though the Irish names of letters, for instance the Mem or Muin, and the Beith, are the Irish names of trees, they are not the known Hebrew names of trees. It is impossible to believe that the Asiatics by accident called their sixteen letters after the Irish names of trees. I think it is pretty clear that the Hebrew letters, and of course the Greek or Cadmean taken from them, were originally called after the Beth-luis-nion of the Irish, or after some language whence that was taken.
78. The ancient Rabbis had a tradition, that the names of the Hebrew letters had the meaning of the names of different trees, and General Vallancey attempts to specify them. But he does not seem to have succeeded. His information is taken from the old Jewish writers, who appear to give rather what they surmise than what they found in the synagogue copies of the Pentateuch. But their opinion is very important indeed, as a record of an old tradition. It seems that the Rabbis had received a tradition that the names of their letters had the meaning of the names of trees, which they wished, but wished in vain, to verify.
79. The General quotes the authority of Bayer, “that each of the Chaldean or Hebrew letters derives its name from some tree or shrub; as ב Beth, a thorn; ד Daleth, a vine; ה He, the pomegranate; ו Vau, the palm; י Jod, ivy; ט Teth, the mulberry-tree; ס Samech, the apple-tree; פ Pe, the cedar; ר Resh, the pine,” &c.[1]
80. There is, as I have said, the strongest probability that the art of figuring or of arithmetic took precedence of the art of writing. The figures would evidently be the first wanted, and probably, in the way I have stated, the names of trees were given to them. The Mexicans had the knowledge of figures—the decimal calculation, but not of letters: the natives of Otaheite had the same.[2] From the use of the first ten or fifteen figures for numbers of the calculi, a transition to letters would not be very difficult, and probably took place and gave them their names of leaves. And I think it very probable that (what is commonly called) the accidental discovery of letters, may have been the original cause of the Old World having attained so superior a state of refinement and civilization—notwithstanding some persons may think this a cause too small for so large an effect. It would, I conceive, operate by geometrical progression.
81. From all these considerations, there is a strong probability that the first alphabet was denoted by the names of trees; and, from a passage of Virgil’s, one might be induced to believe that the leaves themselves were actually used:
Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood,
The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find
Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclined.
She sings the fates, and in her frantic fits
The notes and names, inscribed to leaves commits.
What she commits to leaves, in order laid,
Before the cavern’s entrance are display’d.
Unmoved they lie: but if a blast of wind
Without, or vapours issue from behind,
The leaves are borne aloft in liquid air;
And she resumes no more her museful care,
