The universal divisions of modern literary productions into books, chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, and members of sentences, together with capitalization and the system of punctuation, are so important and so enthralled with modern composition and rhetoric that we could hardly appreciate or understand literature apart from them. Apropos to this observation, Professor DobschÜtz says: "If we look at the earliest manuscripts of the Bible which have come down to us, we shall almost think that supernatural assistance was necessary for reading them; no punctuation, no accent, no space between the words, no breaking off at the end of a sentence. The reader has to know his text almost entirely by heart to do it well."61

These distinctions of literature are mechanical and artificial devices for clarifying and making emphatic a writer's thoughts as expressed in written or printed language and they are comparatively modern devices. Punctuation marks are indispensable in legal documents and in all the commercial operations of the times. The altered position of a comma gives a changed meaning to scripture texts and to legal documents. (As an illustration of the changed position of a comma, note the varying punctuation of Hebrews 10:12 as contained in different editions of our Authorized Version. In all pulpit Bibles which we have examined, the comma is placed after the word "sins," while in the various teachers' Bibles the comma follows the word "forever." By the former punctuation an important New Testament doctrine is negatived.)

Imagine yourself trying to read a philosophical treatise, a technical or abstruse discussion, a scholarly or scientific essay, a thrilling romance, or a legal document, in which there were no distinctions of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or even individual words—no capitalization and no punctuation-marks of any kind to assist in determining a writer's thoughts or the exact meaning of his composition—and you must recognize the obstacles which confront the researchers of ancient literary documents. The difficulties encountered in the literature of the Bible are in no wise diminished when we recall the fact that the originals of our sacred writings, both Hebrew and Greek, were written, for the most part, in solid blocks of letters analogous to our capitals, without any of the distinguishing limits or relief which come from chapters, verses, pause-marks, or words. It was only by degrees and at slow stages that individual words were separated from one another by a spacing between them; then, later, came the grouping of words into sentences by means of pause-marks and other mechanical devices of literature.

The division of the books of the Bible into chapters and verses is of comparatively modern origin. The chapters of the Bible are associated with the name of Cardinal Hugo who, at about the middle of the thirteenth century, divided the Latin Bible into chapters in order to facilitate reference, for comparison of scripture with scripture, and to make available a commentary which he had prepared. The system of verses, so useful for reference in Bible study, is associated with the work of Robert Stephens, a printer of Geneva who divided the chapters of Cardinal Hugo's Latin Bible into verses and affixed a numerical notation to them. This numbering of the verses first appeared in a Greek New Testament which Stephens printed at Geneva in 1531. The same volume contained also the Vulgate and a Latin version by Erasmus.

The importance of punctuation-marks as an artificial aid for conveying a writer's thoughts and in giving emphasis to written or printed language can scarcely be appreciated by the present generation, for it has always been accustomed to their use. In the Greek manuscripts there was, at the first, nothing corresponding to "stops" or pause-marks as in modern literature. In the modern Hebrew literature there are vowels or vowel "pointings" to facilitate reading; but these were not expressed in the ancient Hebrew writing, inasmuch as the Hebrew written language was made up exclusively of consonant letters (commonly three letters to a word) without vowels or vowel "pointings." The idiomatic use of the respective languages occasioned a further difficulty: In English composition, e. g., the logical order is subject, predicate, object with their modifiers in order; and emphasis is indicated by italic and CAPITAL letters, and by pause-marks without varying the order of composition; but with the Greek and Latin literatures emphasis was denoted by the position of words in the sentence, by the relation of a word to other words, or in the use of words with reference to their modifiers.

The development of a system of "pointings" in order to bring out more clearly the meaning of a writer and so facilitate the reading of manuscript literature, began at Alexandria, being first employed in poetical writing. A slight open space at the left of a line, analogous to modern indentation in the margin at the beginning of a paragraph, made its appearance first on the papyri at Alexandria. In the manuscripts of the New Testament the earliest attempts in the direction of punctuation go back to the fourth century A.D., and consisted of an occasional simple point or a small blank space in the writing, which, to that extent, broke up somewhat the otherwise monotonous lines of letters. Stichometry, introduced in the fifth century by a scholar named Euthalius, was an arrangement of the Gospels, the Acts, and the epistles of Paul in lines—regulated according to the sense—each line terminating where some pause should be made in the reading; and so had the force of a system of punctuation, but, owing to the waste of costly parchment, it was not generally or extensively adopted.

Concerning the history of punctuation-marks it is claimed that Jerome, the celebrated scholar of the fourth and fifth centuries (died 420 A. D.) used points similar to our "comma" and "colon." These points, while not in universal use by the writers, were inserted in many old manuscripts. In the ninth century, the stroke called the "comma" came into more common use, and a dot above the line indicated a pause equivalent to the "colon" or the "semicolon," while a full stop was denoted by a large dot or "period" or a double dot, and by a space. The interrogation point, identical in form with our semicolon, occasionally appears. The "breathings" and "accents" with which the Greek literature has come down to us, while traces of them appear in the early centuries, were not common at the end of the seventh century A.D.,—those found in the Vatican manuscript of the fourth century and in the Alexandrian manuscript of the fifth were supplied by a later hand than the writers of these copies. The Latins, in the wake of the Greeks, adopted their system of punctuation, meager as it was, and continued its use in the transcription of the Latin literature throughout the Middle Ages.

The system of punctuation employed in all modern literature, and which is so essential a part of the finished rhetoric, is of recent development as compared with the course of literature, and dates from the time of a Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, late in the fifteenth century. It was largely consequent upon the invention of printing, though some of the punctuation-marks of the modern system were used before the division of the sacred literature into chapters and verses. It is to be noted that the present tendency by the best writers is to simplify punctuation as much as possible.

The system of notation—as with many of the good things of life and much of our wisdom—like the wise men in the days of Herod, came from the East,—from India by way of Arabia. The origin of the completed system of notation as now in universal use, at once simple and complete, is comparatively recent and obscure. Its origin and development had both a practical and a philosophical side. Its beginnings antedate the earliest art, literature, and science. It began in counting and in some sort of tally of separate units,—perhaps upon the fingers. Probably the ten digits of the two hands suggested the widely-extended and ever-available scale of ten for comparison and estimate. Other scales than ten for counting and calculation have been employed by tribes and nations:—scales of twos, and threes, and fives, and sevens, and twelves, and twenties. The ancient Hebrews employed two or more of these scales.

The Hebrews and Greeks as well as the Romans used letters of the alphabet instead of figures for counting and calculations. The system of notation as we now have it was of gradual development. Under Theoderic the Great (454-526 A. D.), Boethius made use of certain marks or signs which were in part similar to our nine digits. This was improved upon by a pupil of Gerbeet, who used signs still more like our nine digits. But all methods of notation preceding the Arabic were unwieldly, complex, and incomplete. The system did not originate with the Arabs. As the Arabs had appropriated the Chinese discovery and use of paper, so they appropriated the Hindu system of notation. The system at first was without a zero: that character was added probably in the seventh century. The decimal character was used to give positional or place value to the nine digits,—the cipher having no value except in combination with the digits; it thus completed the system of notation.