Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

History of Writing (London, 1984).
2. “Early Writing Systems”, in World Archeology 17/3, Henley-on-Thames, Feb. 1986. The Mesopotamian
invention of writing probably influenced other writing systems: the Egyptian, shortly after 3000 BC, and
the Indian, around 2500 BC.
3. William Wordsworth, writing in 1819, described a similar feeling: “O ye who patiently explore / The
wreck of Herculanean lore, / What rapture! Could ye seize / Some Theban fragment, or unrol / One
precious, tender-hearted scroll / Of pure Simonides.”
4. Cicero, De oratore, Vol. I, ed. E.W. Sutton & H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1967), II, 87:
357.
5. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), X, 34.
6. M.D. Chenu, Grammaire et théologie au XII et XIII siècles (Paris, 1935–36).
7. Empedocles, Fragment 84DK, quoted in Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the
Tragic Self (Princeton, 1992).
8. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus”, in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 10, quoted in
David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London, 1983).
9. Ibid.
10. For a lucid explanation of this complex term, see Padel, In and Out of the Mind.
11. Aristotle, De anima, ed. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1943).
12. Quoted in Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago & London, 1990).
13. Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 8–11.
14. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine.
15. Kenneth D. Keele & Carlo Pedretti, eds., Leonardo da Vinci: Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the
Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols. (London, 1978–80).
16. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
17. Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton, 1984).

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18. Sadik A. Assaad, The Reign of al-Hakim bi Amr Allah (London, 1974).
19. These rather elaborate explanations are developed in Saleh Beshara Omar’s Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics:
A Study of the Origins of Experimental Science (Minneapolis & Chicago, 1977).
20. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Oxford, 1976).
21. Émile Charles, Roger Bacon, sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines d’après des textes inédits (Paris,
1861).
22. M. Dax, “Lésions de la moitié gauche de l’encéphale coincidant avec l’oubli des signes de la pensée”,
Gazette hebdomadaire de médicine et de chirurgie, 2 (1865), and P. Broca, “Sur le siège de la faculté du
langage articulé”, Bulletin de la Societé d’anthropologie, 6 337–393 (1865), in André Roch Lecours et al.,
“Illiteracy and Brain Damage (3): A Contribution to the Study of Speech and Language Disorders in
Illiterates with Unilateral Brain Damage (Initial Testing)”, Neuropsychologia 26/4, London, 1988.
23. André Roch Lecours, “The Origins and Evolution of Writing”, in Origins of the Human Brain
(Cambridge, 1993).
24. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and
Developmental Psychology (New York, 1985).
25. Roch Lecours et al., “Illiteracy and Brain Damage (3)”.
26. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1965).
27. Personal interview with André Roch Lecours, Montreal, Nov. 1992.
28. Émile Javal, eight articles in Annales d’oculistique, 1878–79, discussed in Paul A. Kolers, “Reading”,
lecture delivered at the Canadian Psychological Association meeting, Toronto, 1971.
29. Oliver Sacks, “The President’s Speech”, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York,
1987).
30. Merlin C. Wittrock, “Reading Comprehension”, in Neuropsychological and Cognitive Processes in
Reading (Oxford, 1981).
31. Cf. D. LaBerge & S.J. Samuels, “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading”, in