THE LETTER B.
"Or like a lamb, whose dam away is fet,
He treble baas for help, but none can get."
SIDNEY.
Its pronunciation is supposed to resemble the bleating of a sheep; upon which account the Egyptians represented the sound of this letter by the figure of that animal. It is also one of those letters which the eastern grammarians call labial, because the principal organs employed in its pronunciation are the lips. With the ancients, B as a numeral stood for 300. When a line was drawn above it, it stood for 3,000, and with a kind of accent below it, for 200.