* * * * * The forms of our letters, with the exception of G, J, U, W, reached their full development two thousand years ago. The Roman letter was the parent of all the styles notwithstanding the diversity that has appeared in Europe since the beginning of the Christian era. With a little imagination it is not difficult to note the resemblance between similar letters of the old Roman capitals and those following that have been designated as script, italic, Old English or black letter, versal, uncial, and an endless list of alphabet families. The desire for speed, and the influence of the tool, pen, reed, chisel, brush, were the determining factors in the change of form. Curiously enough instead of being archaic, the Roman alphabet, which is now 2,000 years old, is still the most useful because of its legibility, and also the most beautiful. We derived twenty-three of our letters from the Romans. They had taken probably eighteen of these from the Greeks about the fourth century B. C. and afterwards borrowed elsewhere or invented seven more. Instead of giving them names as the Greeks did, they simply called them by the sounds for which they stood: A (ah), B (bay). They introduced the curve wherever possible, whereas the early Greek letters were all angular—what an interesting analogy is evident in the architecture of those two peoples, the temple pediment and angularity of the Greeks as contrasted with the dome and arch of the Romans. The Greeks, in their contact with those great traders and “Yankees of ancient time,” the Phoenicians, saw the value of their alphabetic writing and inaugurated its use about the time of the first Olympiad, 776 B. C. Three or four centuries before they gave it to the Romans the ancient Greeks found use for fifteen of the Phoenician letters and then conceived enough to round out an alphabet of twenty-four characters.The changes that took place in the shape of their letters can be attributed to their sense of order; the letters are balanced better and the parts better related. * * * * * The Greeks were interested in the sound value only, not in the picture value of the symbol, and, therefore, they probably did not notice that A, for instance, had ever been a picture of the head of an ox and that it was now drawn upside down; and that the Phoenician name “Alpeh” meant ox and that they mispronounced the sound in calling it “Alpha.”