Index to Vols. III. and IV. 533 I. INAUGURAL LECTURE, ON THE VALUE OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF ACADEMIC STUDY. Delivered Before the University of Oxford the 27th of October, 1868. The foundation of a professorial chair in the University of Oxford marks an important epoch in the history of every new science.[1] There are other universities far more ready to confer this academical recognition on new branches of scientific research, and it would be easy to mention several subjects, and no doubt important subjects, which have long had their accredited representatives in the universities of France and Germany, but which at Oxford have not yet received this well-merited recognition. If we take into account the study of ancient languages only, we see that as soon as Champollion’s discoveries had given to the study of hieroglyphics and Egyptian antiquities a truly scientific character, the French government thought it its duty to found a chair for this promising branch of Oriental scholarship. Italy soon followed this generous example: nor was the Prussian government long behind hand in doing honor to the newborn science, as soon as in Professor Lepsius it had found a scholar worthy to occupy a chair of Egyptology at Berlin. If France had possessed the brilliant genius to whom so much is due in the deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions, I have little doubt that long ago a chair would have been founded at the _Collège de France_ expressly for Sir Henry Rawlinson. England possesses some of the best, if not the best, of Persian scholars (alas! he who was here in my mind, Lord Strangford, is no longer among us), yet there is no chair for Persian at Oxford or Cambridge, in spite of the charms of its modern literature, and the vast importance of the ancient language of Persia and Bactria, the Zend, a language full of interest, not only to the comparative philologist, but also to the student of Comparative Theology.