516 REMARKS ON THE ORIGIN 
to here is the non-parallelism of the bottom stroke 
of the character A with the line of the inscription, 
or as seen in Y, the top strokes of whose upper 
parts are seen to incline very considerably out of . 
line with the inscription. I would request most 
particular attention to be paid to this fact, as it 
carries with it the most simple, clear, and striking 
evidence of the Babylonian, or arrow-headed 
origin of these characters, each of which may 
be resolved into its elements, and these elements 
being a simple arrow-head. So faithful, indeed, 
is the arrow-headed character kept up in those 
Greek capital letters, and indeed in almost all 
others, of whatever size, that we find the depressed 
angle before alluded to in Fig. 4, No. 1, most 
carefully given; and in every case this is at- 
tended to with the most scrupulous accuracy— 
a circumstance the more remarkable, considering 
the vast length of time which elapsed between 
the period when the arrow-head character was 
first employed by the Babylonians, and that of 
the arrival of Cadmus in Greece, a period not 
less than 1800 years, thus tending to illustrate in 
a striking manner what was alluded to in a former 
part of this paper, namely, the tendency which 
mankind has ever had to cling to forms, which, 
however due to the nature of the material, to the 
