Excerpt from The Science of Railways The Phoenicians excelled all men of their time in executive ability, financial skill and business talent. Out of the necessities of their lives many of the devices in use today originated. The greatest, however, it is probable, is our alphabet. The cuneiform and pictorial writings used by surrounding nations, while answering the purposes of monumental writing or a re stricted business, were not adequate to the ex tended commerce of the tnicians. They re quired some simple and expeditious means of writing up their accounts and of communicating easily with persons at a distance; a method at once cheap, simple, easily learned and capable of particularizing the wants of trade. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.