Many changes other than those already alluded to have come about in the transmission of literature from age to age: Men at first wrote from right to left as the orientals still do. The peoples of early Greece first wrote, as the Chinese still do, perpendicularly to the page, and then from right to left; later, backward and forward from right to left and left to right as in case of furrows made by a side-hill plow; and lastly, from left to right as moderns do. We look for the beginning of the Hebrew Bible where our English Bible ends; and we read it from right to left and turn its pages from left to right. It is much the same with the Chinese books, except that the columns of reading matter extend downwards on the page from top to bottom and not crosswise to the page as in other languages. (_7_) _Palæography and the date of literary productions._ The style and character of the handwriting is of great practical importance to literary criticism and has large historical value. A knowledge as to the history of the individual letters (and each individual letter of the alphabet has a history of its own, as to its genesis and development) and of the arrangement and the appearance of literary productions is of the utmost significance in ascertaining the age, meaning, and value of ancient documents. The style of handwriting, also, has a large place in determining the time or period when a manuscript was written, even when the date is not affixed, just as the spelling of words in our English tongue and the fashion of our typography--ever fluctuating at the demand of artistic taste or attractive appearance--helps to determine, in absence of the date of publication, the approximate time when a book was printed. Illustrative of this, the author once placed on his library shelves an attractive set of books which were represented at the time of purchase as "just from the press" but which he knew at the time were printed from plates made more than a dozen years before although they may have been "fresh from the press";--he knew it from the kind of type employed in their printing, or, more accurately speaking, he knew it from the peculiar quotation-marks used with that particular type, inasmuch as the style of quotation-marks used in those volumes had passed out of current use by printers and publishers some years previously, having had but a feeble tenure of existence. To realize at a glance the ever-changing style of type in modern printing, one needs but to turn the pages of type-manufacturing catalogues. In like manner, the style of handwriting in any language constitutes a kind of verisimilitude for the age of the written literature. Dr. Isaac Taylor has said, "The architecture of different periods is not more characteristic of the age to which it belongs, than is the style of writing in manuscripts, nor is there less of certainty in determining questions of antiquity in the one case than in the other."[59] As the periods of the "Doric," "Ionic,"