The importance of punctuation-marks as an artificial aid for conveying a writer's thoughts and in giving emphasis to written or printed language can scarcely be appreciated by the present generation, for it has always been accustomed to their use. In the Greek manuscripts there was, at the first, nothing corresponding to "stops" or pause-marks as in modern literature. In the modern Hebrew literature there are vowels or vowel "pointings" to facilitate reading; but these were not expressed in the ancient Hebrew writing, inasmuch as the Hebrew written language was made up exclusively of consonant letters (commonly three letters to a word) without vowels or vowel "pointings." The idiomatic use of the respective languages occasioned a further difficulty: In English composition, _e. g._, the logical order is subject, predicate, object with their modifiers in order; and emphasis is indicated by _italic_ and CAPITAL letters, and by pause-marks without varying the order of composition; but with the Greek and Latin literatures emphasis was denoted by the position of words in the sentence, by the relation of a word to other words, or in the use of words with reference to their modifiers. The development of a system of "pointings" in order to bring out more clearly the meaning of a writer and so facilitate the reading of manuscript literature, began at Alexandria, being first employed in poetical writing. A slight open space at the left of a line, analogous to modern indentation in the margin at the beginning of a paragraph, made its appearance first on the papyri at Alexandria. In the manuscripts of the New Testament the earliest attempts in the direction of punctuation go back to the fourth century A. D., and consisted of an occasional simple point or a small blank space in the writing, which, to that extent, broke up somewhat the otherwise monotonous lines of letters. _Stichometry_, introduced in the fifth century by a scholar named Euthalius, was an arrangement of the Gospels, the Acts, and the epistles of Paul in lines--regulated according to the sense--each line terminating where some pause should be made in the reading; and so had the force of a system of punctuation, but, owing to the waste of costly parchment, it was not generally or extensively adopted.