_Signs on Vase-handle_ (_Mycenæ_) 183 69. _Signs on Amphora-handle_ (_Mycenæ_) 183 Acknowledgments are gratefully tendered to Messrs. Macmillan, Messrs. Longmans, Mr. John Murray, Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode, Mr. Edward Arnold, Messrs. Witherby, the Cambridge University Press, and the Anthropological Institute for permission to reproduce Illustrations from their several publications. THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY "What is ever seen is never seen," and it may be questioned if one in ten thousand of the readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is the history of the conventional signs called the ALPHABET, which, in their varying changes of position, make up the symbols of the hundred thousand words and more contained in a comprehensive dictionary of the English tongue. Professor Max Müller says that "by putting together twenty-three or twenty-four letters in every possible variety. We might produce every word that has ever been used in any language of the world. The number of these words, taking twenty-three letters as the basis, would be 25,852,016,738,884,976,640,000, or, if we took twenty-four, would be 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000; but," as the Professor warns us, in words the force of which will be manifest later on, "even these trillions, billions, and millions of sounds would not be words, because they would lack the most important ingredient--that which makes a word to be a word--namely, the different ideas by which they were called into life, and which are expressed differently in different languages." (_Lectures on Language_, ii. 81.)