To return to the cuneiform. It will be remembered that in the case of the _monosyllabic_ Chinese, with its dictionary of forty thousand words, the symbols of these are compounds of phonograms or sound-words with determinatives as keys to the precise meaning to be attached to the phonograms. Now the languages of the ancient peoples of the Euphrates valley are _polysyllabic_, and hence arose the necessity for signs denoting full syllables, both complex, "in which several consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and one vowel or _vice versâ_." (Maspero's _Dawn of Civilization_, p. 728.) And among the libraries of Babylon there were discovered a number of little grammatical documents on bricks, called _syllabaria_, where a list of characters is given, with the phonetic sign explained in simple syllables at one side, and, when used ideographically, at the other. When a syllabary had thus been adopted, the grouping into words was effected by combining the syllables. "But a polysyllabic language did not lend itself so readily as the Chinese monosyllabic to syllabism," and Halévy explains how the difficulty was met. It was met, at least in some degree, by the adoption of the principle of Acrology (Greek _akron_, "extreme" = at the top or start), _i.e._ by the choice of a name from the likeness which it suggested between the form of the letter and some familiar thing whose name began with the letter in question. This re-naming of letters by a word beginning with them occurred in the Egyptian, Russian, Runic, and other alphabets. For example, in Russian, the letter _b_ is not called _beta_ but _buki_, "a beech," while _d_ has lost the old name of delta and acquired that of _dobro_, "an oak." In the Runic letters of our forefathers _b_ is named _beorc_ or "birch," and _th_ "thorn," while the acrologic system comes nearer home to us in the old nursery rhymes: "A was an Archer, who shot at a frog; B was a Butcher, who had a big dog," &c.