The printed letters or sound-signs which compose our alphabet are about two thousand five hundred years old. "Roman type" we call them, and rightly so, since from Italy they came. They vary only in slight degree from the founts of the famous printers of the fifteenth century, these being imitations of the beautiful "minuscule" (so called as being of smaller size) manuscripts of four hundred years earlier. Minuscule letters are cursive (_i.e._ running) forms of the curved letters about an inch long called "uncials" (from Latin _uncia_, "an inch," or from _uncus_, "crooked"), which were themselves derived from the Roman letters of the Augustan age. These Roman capitals, to which those in modern use among us correspond, "are practically identical with the letters employed at Rome in the third century B.C.; such, for instance, as are seen in the well-known inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios, now among the treasures of the Vatican. These, again, do not differ very materially from forms used in the earliest existing specimens of Latin writing, which may probably be referred to the end of the fifth century B.C. Thus it appears that our English alphabet is a member of that great Latin family of alphabets, whose geographical extension was originally conterminous, or nearly so, with the limits of the Western Empire, and afterwards with the ancient obedience to the Roman See." (Canon Isaac Taylor's _History of the Alphabet_, vol. i. p. 71.) The age of our own alphabet being thus indicated, we may postpone further remark on its lineal descent, and pass to inquiry into the primitive forms of which all alphabets are the abbreviated descendants, and also to reference to some primitive methods for which they are substitutes. A survey of the long period which this development covers shows four well-marked stages, although in these, as in aught else appertaining to man's history, there are no true lines of division. The making of these, like the apparent lines of longitude and latitude of the cartographer, is justified by their convenience. These stages are:-- (_a_) The MNEMONIC, or memory-aiding, when some tangible object is used as a message, or for record, between people at a distance, and also for the purpose of accrediting the messenger. As will be seen, it borders on the _symbolic_; indeed, it anticipates that stage. (_b_) The PICTORIAL, in which a picture of the thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story. (_c_) The IDEOGRAPHIC, in which the picture becomes representative, _i.e._ is converted into a symbol. (_d_) The PHONETIC, in which the picture becomes a phonogram, or sound-representing sign. The phonogram may be--(1) _verbal_, _i.e._ a sound-sign for a whole word; (2) _syllabic_, _i.e._ a sound-sign for syllables; or (3) _alphabetic_, a sound-sign for each letter. To recapitulate stages (_b_), (_c_), and (_d_):-- In stage (_b_) the sign as eye-picture suggests the thing;