The gradual divergence of the Phœnician characters from their Hieratic parents is easily accounted for by the difference of the material and the instrument employed by the Phœnicians and Egyptians in writing. The Hieratic charracter was painted by Egyptian priests on smooth papyrus leaves with a brush or broad pointed reed pen. The Canaanite inscriptions are graven with a sharp instrument on hard stone, and as a natural consequence the round curves of the Hieratic character become sharp points, and there is a general simplification of form and a throwing aside of useless lines and dots, the last remnants of the picture from which each Hieratic character originally sprang. The _names_ given later to the Phœnician letters, Aleph, an ‘ox;’ Beth, a ‘house;’ Gimel, a ‘camel;’ Daleth, a ‘door;’ are not the names of the objects from which the forms of these letters were originally taken. The Hieratic ‘A’ was taken from the picture of an eagle, which stood for ‘A’ in hieroglyphics; ‘B’ was originally a sort of heron; ‘D,’ a hand with the fingers spread out. New names were given by the Phœnicians to the forms they had borrowed, from fancied resemblances to objects which, in their language, began with the sound intended, when the original Egyptian names had been forgotten. It is hard for us to see a likeness between our letter ‘A’ and an ox’s horns with a yoke across; or between ‘B’ and the ground-plan of a house; ‘G’ and a camel’s head and neck; ‘M’ and water; ‘W’ and a set of teeth; ‘P’ and the back of a head set on the neck; but our letters have gone through a great deal of straightening and putting into order since they came into Europe and were sent out on their further westward travels. The reader who has an opportunity of examining early specimens of letters on Greek coins will find a freedom of treatment which makes them much more suggestive of resemblances, and the earlier Phœnician letters were, no doubt, more pictorial still. The interesting and important thing to be remembered concerning our letters is that each one of them was, without doubt, a picture once, and gets its shape in no other way than by having once stood for an object, whose name in the ancient people’s language began with the sound it conveys to us.