different scholars in support of their conflicting theories, it is our first duty to ask a preliminary question, viz.: What kind of evidence have we any right to expect, considering that both Sanskrit and Hebrew belong, in the state in which we know them, to the inflectional stratum of speech? Now it is quite true that Sanskrit and Hebrew had a separate existence long before they reached the tertiary stratum, before they became thoroughly inflectional; and that consequently they can share nothing in common that is peculiar to the inflectional stratum in each, nothing that is the result of phonetic decay, which sets in after combinatory formations have become unintelligible and traditional. I mean, supposing that the pronoun of the first person had been originally the same in the Semitic and Aryan languages, supposing that in the Hebrew _an-oki_ (Assyrian _an-aku_, Phen. _anak_) the last portion, _oki_, was originally identical with the Sanskrit +ah+ in +aham+, the Greek ἐγ in ἐγ-ώ, it would still be useless to attempt to derive the termination of the first person singular, whether in _kâtal-ti_ or in _ektôl_, from the same type which in Sanskrit appears as +mi+ or +am+ or +a+, in +tudâ-mi+, +atud-am+, +tutod-a+. There cannot be between Hebrew and Sanskrit the same relationship as between Sanskrit and Greek, if indeed the term of relationship is applicable even to Sanskrit and Greek, which are really mere dialectic varieties of one and the same type of speech. The question then arises, Could the Semitic and Aryan languages have been identical during the second or _combinatory_ period? Here, as before, the answer must be, I believe, decidedly negative, for not only are the empty words which are used for derivative purposes different in each, but, what is far more characteristic, the manner in which they are added to the stems is different too. In the Aryan languages formative elements are attached to the ends of words only; in the Semitic languages they are found both at the end and at the beginning. In the Aryan languages grammatical compounds are all according to the formula rρ; in the Semitic we have formations after the formulas rρ, ρr, and ρrρ.