THE modern species of the genus Homo has been christened variously: sapiens, the wise; faber, the tool-maker; loquens, the speaker; but man's most extraordinary accomplishment warrants the epithet: Homo scribens et legens, man the writer and reader. Contemporary man, wherever he has been found and whatever his state of culture, has possessed a spoken language; every language thus far encountered has been complex and sophisticated. The origins of the faculty of speech are lost in antiquity. It can be deduced confidently that Cro-Magnon man, who lived from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, possessed language; his fabrication of tools, his ceremonial burials, and, most of all, his cave paintings, all bespeak the necesary level of conceptulization. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that Neanderthal man, the maker of stone tools and of fire, knowledgeable enough to cook his food, a man with a cranial capacity in no wise inferior to our own and with endocranial markings indicative of frontal and parietal lobe differentiation, may have possessed the gift of tongues as long as 50,000 years ago. The invention of writing, on the other hand, dates no earlier than the fourth millenium before Christ. Consider the exponential rate of development of society in the 5,000 years since written language as against the limited progress in the 50,000 years of spoken language that preceded it. True, technological advances other than literacy have been catalysts of this revolutionary transformation but few are the advances that have not been mediated by written symbols. The magnificence of this accomplishment transcends the creature comforts it has enabled man to attain.