I’m still parsing through the book. Some highlights:

All those ⟨ſ⟩ “in the wild”, in a book about the evolution of the alphabet. The pattern between Latin ⟨s⟩/⟨ſ⟩ was roughly the same as Greek ⟨ς⟩/⟨σ⟩ - one for final position, another elsewhere.

Back then they still framed the alphabet as the ultimate form of writing, standing over all others. As if anything before that was more “primitive” = worse. Nowadays we kind of get that it’s simply alternatives - all of them with pros and cons. (And on a diachronic view, the more details a writing system has about the spoken language, the more you need to change once the language changes. Look at the mess English did of its own orthography due to the Great Vowel Shift, for example.)

Those writers who have espoused the opinion of a Divine inspiration of alphabetic writing, have in general supposed the account of these judgments to be proleptically set down, merely to favour an hypothesis, that a knowledge of the first alphabetic CHARACTERS, likewise, was supernaturally discovered, by a miraculous impression upon the two tables of stone.

Eh, divine influence sounds real funny in 2025. I don’t think even religious people would take it seriously. The rebus principle (“represent things by what they sound like”) is a way better explanation.

Symbolic writing, amongst the Ægyptians, may reasonably be presumed to have been one source of their idolatrous worship

Have you heard about the Norse runes? Alphabetic, and also subjected to religious practices the same author would consider “idolatrous” (i.e. non-Christian, or perhaps non-Abrahamic). People always saw power on the words, and the written word is the materialisation of what would be ephemeral, as if you were to crystallise that power.

This is fucking cool. Thanks for sharing it, OP.