Egyptians used several signs for each letter, the Phœnicians easily fell into the habit of giving a slightly different value to two forms originally identical, and thus provided for all the more delicate distinctions of their tongue. A close comparison of the forms of the letters of the earliest known Canaanite inscriptions with Hieratic writing of the time of the Old Empire reveals a resemblance so striking between fifteen of the Phœnician letters and Hieratic characters carrying the same sounds, that a conviction of the derivation of one from the other impresses itself on even a careless observer. The correspondence of the other five Canaanite letters with their Hieratic counterparts is less obvious to the uneducated eye, but experts in such investigations see sufficient likeness even there to confirm the theory. The gradual divergence of the Phœnician characters from their Hieratic parents is easily accounted for by the difference of the material and the instrument employed by the Phœnicians and Egyptians in writing. The Hieratic charracter was painted by Egyptian priests on smooth papyrus leaves with a brush or broad pointed reed pen. The Canaanite inscriptions are graven with a sharp instrument on hard stone, and as a natural consequence the round curves of the Hieratic character become sharp points, and there is a general simplification of form and a throwing aside of useless lines and dots, the last remnants of the picture from which each Hieratic character originally sprang. The _names_ given later to the Phœnician letters, Aleph, an ‘ox;’ Beth, a ‘house;’ Gimel, a ‘camel;’ Daleth, a ‘door;’ are not the names of the objects from which the forms of these letters were originally taken. The Hieratic ‘A’ was taken from the picture of an eagle, which stood for ‘A’ in hieroglyphics; ‘B’ was originally a sort of heron; ‘D,’ a hand with the fingers spread out. New names were given by the Phœnicians to the forms they had borrowed, from fancied resemblances to objects which, in their language, began with the sound intended, when the original Egyptian names had been forgotten. It is hard for us to see a likeness between our letter ‘A’ and an ox’s horns with a yoke across; or between ‘B’ and the ground-plan of a house; ‘G’ and a camel’s head and neck; ‘M’ and water; ‘W’ and a set of teeth; ‘P’ and the back of a head set on the neck; but our letters have gone through a great deal of straightening and putting into order since they came into Europe and were sent out on their further westward travels. The reader who has an opportunity of examining early specimens of letters on Greek coins will find a freedom of treatment which makes them much more suggestive of resemblances, and the earlier Phœnician letters were, no doubt, more pictorial still. The interesting and important thing to be remembered concerning our letters is that each one of them was, without doubt, a picture once, and