phonetic laws that made these languages to differ from each other. _To doom_ cannot have any connection with the Latin _damnare_; _to call_ cannot be the Greek καλεῖν, the Latin _calare_; nor Greek φαῦλος the German _faul_; the English _care_ cannot be identified with Latin _cura_, nor the German _Auge_ with the Greek αὐγή. The same applies, only with a hundred-fold greater force, to words in Hebrew and Sanskrit. If any triliteral root in Hebrew were to agree with a triliteral word in Sanskrit, we should feel certain, at once, that they are not the same, or that their similarity is purely accidental. Pronouns, numerals, and a few imitative rather than predicative names for father and mother, etc., may have been preserved from the earliest stage by the Aryan and Semitic speakers; but if scholars go beyond, and compare such words as Hebrew _barak_, to bless, and Latin _precari_; Hebrew _lab_, heart, and the English _liver_; Hebrew _melech_, king, and the Latin _mulcere_, to smoothe, to quiet, to subdue, they are in great danger, I believe, of proving too much. Attempts have lately been made to point out a number of roots which Chinese shares in common with Sanskrit. Far be it from me to stigmatize even such researches as unscientific, though it requires an effort for one brought up in the very straitest school of Bopp, to approach such inquiries without prejudice. Yet, if conducted with care and sobriety, and particularly with a clear perception of the limits within which such inquiries must be confined, they are perfectly legitimate; far more so than the learned dogmatism with which some of our most eminent scholars have declared a common origin of Sanskrit and Chinese as out of the question. I cannot bring myself to say that the method which Mr. Chalmers adopts in his interesting work on the “Origin of Chinese” is likely to carry conviction to the mind of the _bonà fide_ skeptic. I believe, before we compare the words of Chinese with those of any other language, every effort should be made to trace Chinese words back to their most primitive form. Here Mr. Edkins has pointed out the road that ought to be followed, and has clearly shown the great advantage to be derived from an accurate study of Chinese dialects. The same scholar has done still more by pointing out how Chinese should at first be compared with its nearest relatives, the Mongolian of the North-Turanian, and the Tibetan of the South-Turanian class, before any comparisons are attempted with more distant colonies that started during the monosyllabic period of speech. “I am now seeking to compare,” he writes, “the Mongolian and Tibetan with the Chinese, and have already obtained some interesting results:--