The Lost Language of Symbolism. An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairly Tales, Folk Lore and Mythologies. By Harold Bayley. Vols.  2. Williams and Norgate. London.

Like searchlights flashing over the darkness of unknown or obscured regions, these volumes reveal to us beneath familiar words and more or less widely known pictures an inexhaustible wealth of forgotten and unrecognized symbolic meaning and symbolism of expression. With a survey world wide in extent and reaching into the remotest periods of history and mythology the author shows this symbolism to be the foundation of all language, spoken, written or expressed in mystic drawings.

Mr. Bayley begins with a discussion of the symbolism employed by the Mystics of the Middle Ages, when it was necessary for them, persecuted and suppressed, to communicate in pictorial language, used largely in printers marks and paper-marks, and understood only by the members of their widely scattered company. Through this discussion we are led afar into the mysticism of past ages in many lands, of which these emblems of a later time are but the descendants and adaptations. The symbolism of Christianity and of Free-masonry, a stronghold of symbolism within Christianity, is developed from that of the ancient world, to express the same fundamental conceptions of the Godhead, the great and glorious Sun, Source of Life, the Brilliant, Ever-existent, with the attributes and manifestations at last embodied in the Christian faith.

Through his philological knowledge and skill we see in its crystallization