(4) _Latin._--This is, far and away, the most important of all alphabets. As stated above, it is derived from the Chalcidian type of the Hellenic, so called because in use at Chalcis, in Eubœa, an island of the Ægean, whence migrated one of the several Greek colonies planted in Southern Italy. As the oldest Italic scripts--copying the older method of the Greek--read from right to left, and as the first thing aimed at by the colonists would be the use of common sound-signs and numerals, there is good warrant for fixing the date of the introduction of the Greek alphabet into Italy at about the eighth century before Christ. The various derived scripts--Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan, and others--have all, the Latin alone excepted, passed away. The ultimate dominance of the Latins brought about the abolition of every other alphabet than their own, which, becoming the alphabet of the Roman Empire, and then of Christendom, secured an everlasting supremacy. It was the vehicle of Greek and Roman culture to Western Europe; it is the vehicle of all the culture of the progressive races of the world. Although essentially identical with the Greek, it took its own line, and that, compared with the Slavonic, a simple one. The earliest Indo-European or "Aryan" language contained, so far as can be discovered, twelve consonants and three vowels (_i_, _a_, _u_), and to these last the Latin added _e_ and _o_. It at first rejected the Greek K, and used C for the sounds of both _k_ and _g_, but later on added a bar to the lower end of C, converting it into G. Similarly, R is but a variation of P, by the addition of a stroke below the crook. And while the later Greek rejected Q, the Latin retained it. But not to multiply examples, citations of which are confusing in the absence of explanations of the causes necessitating changes of form, explanations too technical for admission here (see for examples Taylor, ii. 140), it may suffice to give a few specimens of variations between the older and newer Latin and Greek forms. [Illustration: FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIR PROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS]