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224 valley of the Nile, and we find that the Egyptian hieroglyphic for n was the serpent, ; the Pelasgian n was ; the Arcadian, ; the Etruscan,.

Can anything he more significant than to find the serpent the sign for n in Central America, and in all these Old World languages?

Now turn to the letter k. The Maya sign for k is. This does not look much like our letter K; but let us examine it. Following the precedent established for us by the Mayas in the case of the letter m, let us see what is the distinguishing feature here; it is clearly the figure of a serpent standing erect, with its tail doubled around its middle, forming a circle. It has already been remarked by Savolini that this erect serpent is very much like the Egyptian Uræus, an erect serpent with an enlarged body—a sacred emblem found in the hair of their deities. We turn again to the valley of the Nile, and we find that the Egyptian hieroglyphic for k was a serpent with a convolution or protuberance in the middle, precisely as in the Maya, thus, ; this was transformed into the Egyptian letter ; the serpent and the protuberance reappear in one of the Phœnician forms of k, to wit, ; while in the Punic we have these forms, and. Now suppose a busy people trying to give this sign: instead of drawing the serpent in all its details they would abbreviate it into something like this, ; now we turn to the ancient Ethiopian sign for k (ka), and we have, or the Himyaritic Arabian ; while in the Phœnician it becomes ; in the archaic Greek, ; and in the later Greek, when they changed the writing from left to right,. So that the two lines projecting from the upright stroke of our English K are a reminiscence of the convolution of the serpent in the Maya original and the Egyptian copy.

Turn now to the Maya sign for t: it is. What is the distinctive mark about this figure? It is the cross composed of two curved lines, thus,. It is probable that in this