This has bothered me for a while now: Do you know if there ever was a point to the long ’s’ (ſ) or it were just a decorative distinction? Unlike letters like ’Ѣ’ or ’Ѳ’ that came to represent the same sounds as ’е’ and ’ф’ in Russian, but were originally distinct, the s’s seem to have derived from the same source, and have always sounded exactly alike. I guess, what I am trying to discover, is weather there was any rationale behind their use, or was it merely a fluke of the evolutionary process.

Granted, it looks ſtunningly impreſſive in Italics!