ANCIENT WORDS STILL IN USE. The ancient Greeks and Romans have left us some things more useful than the ruins of their buildings. These are the words in our language which once were theirs, and which we use with slight changes in spelling. Most of our words came in the beginning from Germany, where our English forefathers lived before they settled in England. To the words they took over from Germany they added words borrowed from other peoples, just as we do now. We have recently borrowed several words from the French, such as tonneau and limousine, words used to describe parts of an automobile, besides the name automobile itself, which is made up of a Latin and a Greek word. [Illustration: RUINS OF A HOUSE AT POMPEII The houses of the better sort were built with an open court in the center] In this way, for hundreds of years, words have been coming into our language from other languages. Several thousand have come from Latin, the language of the Romans; several hundred from Greek, either directly or passed on to us by the Romans or the French. The word school is Greek, and the word arithmetic was borrowed from the French, who took it from the Greeks. Geography is another word which came, through French and Latin, from the Greeks, to whom it meant that which is written about the earth. The word grammar came in the same way. The word alphabet is made by joining together the names of the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta. Many words about religion are borrowed from the Greeks, and this is not strange, for the New Testament was written in Greek. Some of these are Bible, church, bishop, choir, angel, devil, apostle, and martyr. The Greeks have handed down to us many words about government, including the word itself, which in the beginning meant "to steer." Politics meant having to do with a _polis_ or city. Several of the words most recently made up of Greek words are telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and thermometer. MANY WORDS BORROWED FROM THE ROMANS. Nearly ten times as many of our words are borrowed from the Romans as from the Greeks, and it is not strange, because at one time the Romans ruled over all the country now occupied by the Italians, the French, the Spaniards, a part of the Germans, and the English, so that these peoples naturally learned the words used by their conquerors and governors.