In an earlier communication to "The Times" (September 15), Mr. Evans had explained more distinctly the importance of the clay tablets found at Knossos, as throwing light on the origin of the alphabet: "In my excavation of the pre-historic Palace at Knossos," he wrote, "I came upon a series of deposits of clay tablets, representing the Royal archives, the inscriptions on which belong to two distinct systems of writing—one hieroglyphic and quasi-pictorial; the other for the most part linear and much more highly developed. Of these the hieroglyphic class especially presents a series of forms answering to what, according to the names of the Phoenician letters, we must suppose to have been the original pictorial designs from which these, too, were derived. A series of conjectural reconstructions of the originals of the Phoenician letters on this line were in fact drawn out by my father, Sir John Evans, for a lecture on the origin of the alphabet given at the Royal Institution in 1872, and it may be said that two-thirds of these resemble almost line for line actual forms of Cretan hieroglyphics. The oxhead (Aleph), the house (Beth), the window (He), the peg (Vau), the fence (Cheth), the hand (Yod) seen sideways, and the open palm (Kaph), the fish (Nun), the post or trunk (Samekh), the eye (Ain), the mouth, (Pe), the teeth (Shin), the cross-sign (Tau), not to speak of several other probable examples, are all literally reproduced. "The analogy thus supplied is indeed overwhelming. It is impossible to believe that, while on one side of the East Mediterranean basin these alphabetic prototypes were naturally evolving themselves, the people of the opposite shore were arriving at the same result by a complicated process of selection and transformation of a series of hieratic Egyptian signs derived from quite different objects. The analogy with the Cretan hieroglyphic forms certainly weighs strongly in favour of the simple and natural explanation of the origin of the Phoenician letters which was held from the time of Gesenius onwards, and was only disturbed by the extremely ingenious, though over-elaborate, theory of De Rougé."