gets its shape in no other way than by having once stood for an object, whose name in the ancient people’s language began with the sound it conveys to us. These Phœnician letters, born on the walls of Egyptian tombs older than Abraham, and selected by Phœnician traders who took their boats up to Memphis at or before Joseph’s time, are the parents of all the alphabets now used in the world, with the exception of that one which the Japanese have taken from Chinese picture-writing. The Phœnicians carried their alphabet about with them to all the countries where they planted trading settlements, and it was adopted by Greeks, and by the Latins from the Greeks, and then gradually modified to suit the languages of all the civilized peoples of east and west.[138] The Hebrew square letters are a form of divergence from the original type, and even the Sanskrit character in all its various styles can be traced back to the same source by experts who have studied the transformations through which it has passed in the course of ages. It is, of course, easy to understand that these ubiquitous little shapes which through so many centuries have had the task laid on them of spelling words in so many different languages must have undergone some variations in their values to suit the tongues that interpreted them. The original family of twenty letters have not always kept together, or avoided the intrusion of new comers. Some of the languages they have had to express, being in an early [Sidenote: Runes.] stage of development, have not wanted even so many as twenty letters, and have gradually allowed some of them to fall into disuse and be forgotten; an instance of this we find in the alphabet of the northern nations--the Gothic--which consisted only of sixteen _runes_--called by new names; they have been handed down either directly from the Greek, or from the Greek through the Roman alphabet, and furnished with mystic meanings and with names peculiar to themselves. [Sidenote: Additional letters.]