I have insisted on this point because it is a very important one in a study like Assyriology. The public naturally thinks that in all Assyriological matters the opinion of one Assyriologist is as good as that of another. We might just as well suppose that in all matters which come under the head of astronomy the opinions of every class of astronomer are equally authoritative. But in astronomy there are questions which are purely mathematical, and there are other questions which are more or less chemical, and the astronomer who has devoted his attention to the spectrum analysis is contented to leave to his mathematical colleague abstruse calculations in advanced mathematics. The Assyriologist who is a grammarian pure and simple is just as little an authority on the archæological side of his study as any one else who is ignorant of archæology, and the materials he provides must be dealt with by the archæologist like the literary materials provided for him by the classical philologist; the materials in both cases stand on the same footing. At the same time, there is a difference between them. In the first place, the literary materials with which the Assyriologist deals are in a very large number of instances autographs. They are the actual documents of the writers whose names they bear or to whose age they belong. And there is all the difference in the world between the letters of a Plato or a Cicero which have come down to us through numerous copyists and the letters of Khammu-rabi of Babylon, the originals of which are now in our hands. The inscriptions in which Nebuchadrezzar describes his building operations or the contemporaneous annals of the Assyrian kings are, from the historical point of view, of far more value than the books written about them at a later date, however admirable the latter may be as works of literature; in other words, they are first-hand sources, and, as such, objective facts of much the same character as ancient pottery or stone implements. Then, in the second place, the documents have to be deciphered before they can be treated philologically; and, as I have already said, the task of decipherment is in itself an archæological pursuit. If carried out on correct lines it is itself an instance of the application of the inductive method, and it is, moreover, constantly compelled to call archæology or history to its aid. Assyriology is thus primarily an archæological study, using the methods of archæological science and demanding the help of the archæologist, even though there are Assyriologists who are not archæologists themselves.