(_c_) THE HELLENIC.--It was a happy chance that, in the westward course of the Phœnician alphabet, the Greeks were the first to receive it. For while the various scripts of Asia and the Malayan Archipelago, which are derived from that alphabet, have retained, in the main, its consonantal character, leaving the vowels to be only partially indicated, the Greeks, with master-touch, shaped it to relative perfection in adding separate letters to represent the vowels, so that there might be a visible sign for every audible sound of the human voice. Besides this, they put some of the superfluous gutturals and sibilants to new uses, simplified other characters, and ultimately transposed the Semitic mode of writing from right to left by writing from left to right. These, and other changes both in the Greek and its derived alphabets, were made slowly and almost imperceptibly, "descent with modification," to apply the Darwinian phrase concerning plants and animals to the scripts of the world, being as much a feature in their history as in that of organisms generally. To complete the parallel, when a certain stage of adaptation is reached, there is, as _e.g._ in the case of our own alphabet, mainly through the invention of printing, arrest of development. Nature may aim at perfection, but is content with adjustment, and the works of man abide only as they are, in Stoic maxim, "according to nature." The alphabets derived from the Hellenic are (1) _Greek_, (2) _Russian_, (3) _Coptic_, (4) _Latin_. (1) _Greek._--To the ancient Greek Hellas meant no defined country, but simply the abode of the Hellenes, whether in Smyrna, Syracuse, Athens, or wherever else they might be found. The mountainous character of Greece explains its division into a crowd of petty states, many of which were no bigger than a modern township. This accorded with Aristotle's view that the area of the state should not be wider than an orator's voice would carry. The physical separation of the peoples explains that political disunion which was the curse of the country from first to last, and accounts for the forty local alphabets which made for discord. But the federation at the time of the Persian invasion, when the victories of Marathon and Salamis fostered conceptions of a common fatherland, was followed by the rise of Athens, and her intellectual supremacy determined that of one of the alphabets. These had settled into two leading groups, the Ionian (in which the Corinthian may be included) and the Chalcidian. The Ionian, which was developed in the famous colony of that name, deviated more from the Phœnician type than the Chalcidian. It was adopted by Athens 483 B.C., and became the classic alphabet of Greece. From it there sprang the Slavonic, Coptic, and other alphabets, while the Chalcidian gave birth to the alphabets of Western Europe.