In their original condition, these children initials are most decorative, but many of the copies are greatly inferior. These are to be found not only in Venetian impressions by other printers, but also in some books printed in provincial towns, and they evidently inspired many of the children’s alphabets that were used afterwards in Basle, Cologne, Hagenau, and one or two initials we have given of Paris. At Turin some of them were used in the _Epistole Heroidum_ of Ovid published by F. Silva in 1510, in which we find that the L with the satyr, the P with a bird, the T with children playing with a skipping rope, an M with an eagle, the N with a child and dolphin, and the G, but of much coarser execution than the original. From a documentary point of view these letters are perhaps not so interesting as the alphabet used currently half a century later by Giolito and other Venetian printers, in which the games then in vogue are represented in linear engraving upon a white ground. But the introduction of animals in the earlier alphabet is not entirely fanciful, and the classical student will no doubt be able to understand many of the allusions. The A, for instance, with a boy riding upon the back of a dolphin, is a case in point and no doubt refers to the tale of Arion told by Herodotus, and more fully by Ovid in the _Fasti_.[27] [27] In the eighth chapter of his ninth book, Pliny speaks of a dolphin that had conceived a wonderful affection for the child of a poor man. At whatever hour of the day he might happen to be called by the boy, he would instantly fly to the surface, and sportively taking him up on his back, he would carry him over a wide expanse of sea to the school at Puteoli, and in like manner bring him back again. Other instances of the same kind are related, which he says give an air of credibility to the one that is told of Arion.