Here the first sign, the sieve, is to be pronounced _chu_; the second, the horned serpent, _fu_, and the little bird, again, _u_. In the more cursive or Hieratic writing the horned serpent appears as [Egyptian character]; in the later Demotic as [Egyptian character] and [Egyptian character]. The Phœnicians, who borrowed their letters from the Hieratic Egyptian, wrote [Phoenician character] and [Phoenician character]. The Greeks, who took their letters from the Phœnicians, wrote [Greek character]. When the Greeks, instead of writing, like the Phœnicians, from right to left, began to write from left to right, they turned each letter, and as [Phoenician character] became [Greek character], our k, so [Phoenician character], vau, became F, the Greek so-called Digamma, [Greek character], the Latin F. The first letter in _Chu-fu_, too, still exists in our alphabet, and in the transverse line of our H we may recognize the last remnant of the lines which divide the sieve. The sieve appears in Hieratic as [Egyptian character], in Phœnician as [Phoenician character], in ancient Greek as [Greek character], which occurs on an inscription found at Mycenæ and elsewhere as the sign of the spiritus asper, while in Latin it is known to us as the letter H.(9) In the same manner the undulating line of our capital L [Cursive L] still recalls very strikingly the bent back of the crouching lion, [Egyptian character], which in the later hieroglyphic inscriptions represents the sound of L. If thus in our language we are Aryan, in our letters Egyptian, we have only to look at our watches to see that we are Babylonian. Why is our hour divided into sixty minutes, our minute into sixty seconds? Would not a division of the hour into ten, or fifty, or a hundred minutes have been more natural? We have sixty divisions on the dials of our watches simply because the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B. C., accepted the Babylonian system of reckoning time, that system being sexagesimal. The Babylonians knew the decimal system, but for practical purposes they counted by _sossi_ and _sari_, the _sossos_ representing 60, the _saros_ 60 × 60, or 3,600. From Hipparchus that system found its way into the works of Ptolemy, about 150 A. D., and thence it was carried down the stream of civilization, finding its last resting-place on the dial-plates of our clocks.