eastern part of the province of Kiang-si, the soft initials have likewise been replaced by aspirates. In many parts of the province of Hunan the soft initials still linger on; but in the city of Chang-sha the spoken dialect has the five tones of Mandarin, and the aspirated and other initials distributed in the same manner. In the island of Hai-nan there is a distinct approach to the form which Chinese words assume in the language of Annam. Many of the hard consonants are softened, instead of the reverse taking place as in many other parts of China. Thus _ti_, _di_, both _ti_ in Mandarin, are both pronounced _di_ in Hai-nan. _B_ and _p_ are both used for many words whose initials are _w_ and _f_ in Mandarin. In the dialects of the province of Fuhkien the following changes take place in initial consonants: _k_ is used for _h_; _p_ for _f_; _m_, _b_, for _w_; _j_ for _y_; _t_ for _ch_; _ch_ for _s_; _ng_ for _i_, _y_, _w_; _n_ for _j_.[26] When we have clearly realized to ourselves what such changes mean in words consisting of one consonant and one vowel, we shall be more competent to act as judges, and to determine what right we have to call for more ample and more definite evidence in support of the common origin of languages which became separated during their monosyllabic or isolating stages, and which are not known to us before they are well advanced in the inflectional stage. It might be said,--Why, if we make allowance for all this, the evidence really comes to nothing, and is hardly deserving of the attention of the scholar. I do not deny that this is, and always has been my own opinion. All I wish to put clearly before other scholars is, that this is not our fault. We see why there can be no evidence, and we find there is no evidence, or very little support of a common origin of Semitic and Aryan speech. But that is very different from dogmatic assertions, so often and so confidently repeated, that there can be no kind of relationship between Sanskrit and Hebrew, that they must have had different beginnings, that they represent, in fact, two independent species of human speech. All this is pure dogmatism, and no true scholar will be satisfied with it, or turn away contemptuously from the tentative researches of scholars like Ewald, Raumer, and Ascoli. These scholars, particularly Raumer and Ascoli, have given us, as far as I can judge, far more evidence in support of a radical relationship between Hebrew and Sanskrit than, from my point of view, we are entitled to expect. I mean this as a caution in both directions. If, on one side, we ought not to demand more than we have a right to demand, we ought, on the other, not to look for, nor attempt to bring forward, more evidence than the nature of the case admits of. We know that words which have identically the same sound and meaning in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and German, cannot be the same words, because they would contravene those