still done in Italian. It was not until the 11th century that the custom
of spacing all words became general and then only in Latin manuscripts.
The correct separation of words in Greek manuscripts was never
established until the manuscripts themselves were superseded by printing
in the 15th century.

The paragraph appears as early as the 4th century B.C. It was generally
indicated, however, by a horizontal mark rather than by spacing. The
indenting of the paragraph came later and was followed by the use of the
larger letter, first employed to indicate the beginning of the
sentences. The development of the sentence itself as a device in
composition was somewhat similar to that of the paragraph.

It is difficult to tell where the use of punctuation begins. Some very
early manuscripts show the rudiments of it. The first punctuation mark
was the stop at the end of the period. This was originally two dots, or
our colon. When this became one dot it was at first the lower one that
was omitted so that the second form of the period is a dot level with
the top of the letter. The period, colon, and comma were each
represented by a single dot, the value depending upon whether it was on
a level with the top, the middle, or the bottom of the letter. During
the middle ages a system of punctuation was developed approximately as
we now have it.

Unfortunately words had the same tendency to refuse to fit the line that
bothers the modern compositor. The scribe, not being limited by the
resources of a font of type, did not hesitate to crowd his letters or
reduce them in size in order to get a word into a line. He also made use
of various devices of abbreviating words and combining letters to
produce the same result. These devices, however, were not very
satisfactory and division of words was always more or less practiced.
The Greeks usually divided after a vowel with no regard to syllables.
They even divided monosyllables in this way. The Romans, however, always
practiced syllabic division very much as we do to-day.

Another form of division of the text was what is called calometry, that
is to say, the breaking up of the text into short clauses or sense lines
to facilitate oral reading. This is done particularly in cases of
orations, the Bible, and similar compositions largely used for oral
reading. As in the papyrus, the title was ordinarily inserted at the end
and accompanied by some account of the work, place of copying, copyist,