Latin had been the language of intellectual Europe up to the time of the fall of Rome (476 A.D.) and one of the influences that led up to this benighted period was that Southern Europe was overrun by so-called barbarians from Germania in the north—the Angles and Saxons, who settled in Britain; the Franks, Burgundians and Goths, who settled in Gaul (now France) and Germany; the Vandals who settled in Spain, and the Lombards, who settled in Italy. In Italy, Spain and Gaul the Latin-speaking natives far outnumbered the invaders, and the Germanic conquerors were forced to learn something of Latin. The present languages of those countries are the result of that attempt. The language of the Germanic Angles and Saxons was used in Britain after their invasion of that country, but was modified by the French-speaking Normans who conquered England in the eleventh century. Thus Latin as a common language died. * * * * * Altho dead to most of the population of Europe, Latin was made the official language of the Christian church, and, during that period of the Middle Ages when French, Spanish, Italian and English were in a state of evolution, it afforded a means of keeping alive in written books the knowledge the world had gained before the dark curtain of ignorance was rung down. Manuscript books are so-called from the Latin words _manu scripti_, meaning “written by hand,” and the initials of these two Latin words are frequently used for the word manuscript, i.e., “MS.” The materials upon which books were written have at various times been clay, stone, wood, lead, skin, papyrus and paper. [Illustration: ASSYRIAN CLAY TABLET Showing the cuneiform (arrow-shaped) writing ] Looking back six thousand years to the beginning of recorded time we find the Chaldeans (Babylonians and Assyrians) writing arrow-shaped characters with a sharp tri-pointed instrument upon damp clay, which was then made permanent by baking. In 1845 a library of baked clay tablets was discovered among the ruins of Nineveh. Thousands of these tablets have been collected in the British Museum, the most interesting of which is one which had been broken in eighteen pieces, containing an account of the Flood. Twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era, when the great pyramids were being built, the Egyptians wrote upon papyrus, a plant growing on the banks of the Nile. The inner portion of the plant was stripped, the strips laid across each other, pressed and dried. The squares of material thus made were then joined together to form a long strip which was rolled around a rod. Upon papyrus is written one of the oldest “books” in the world, “The Book of the Dead,” now in the British Museum. This is a literary work of a semi-sacred character, and copies were placed in the tombs with deceased Egyptians, whence its name. A reproduction of a portion of this book is given on page three.