You may remember my telling you how hard it is to distinguish some of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet from one another, and how the same difficulty is experienced in the case of the Arabic and Persian alphabets. This is due to various reasons, among which was the employment by those nations of pen, paper, and ink for perpetuating records. This tended to make their writing less and less easy to read; and as inscriptions on stone were not common, people did not have the ancient models of letters before their eyes to refer to. [Illustration: ROMAN WRITING MATERIALS.] The capital letters of our own alphabet, however, are easily distinguishable from one another. We owe this fact largely to the Romans, a clear-headed, practical people, who used for every-day writing slates or boards covered with a thin film of wax, on which the letters were engraved, or furrowed, by a sharp-pointed instrument called a _stylus_, from which we derive the term “style,” in literature. The yielding quality of the wax encouraged the use of fine, open and legible characters, and the Romans handed down to us an alphabet improved in many ways. But the most curious example of the modifying influence of the writing materials upon the writing is seen in the cuneiform characters. If, on a hot summer’s day, you should walk between the long lines of bricks in one of the many brickyards that line certain sections of the Hudson river, you would find the fresh-made bricks quite soft, and steaming under the direct rays of the sun. If one of those soft bricks were given into your hand and you were asked to draw a rebus on it, and given a nail with which to do it, you would meet with this difficulty: If, in drawing the outlines of your pictures, you should press equally along the whole length of every line, you would raise small ridges on each side; or, as you became more expert, one ridge on one side, as a plow does when drawing a furrow. And when you should come to draw one line across another, there would be two ugly interfering ridges.