We have said that De Sacy remained unconvinced that the names of Darius and Xerxes were to be found in the Persepolitan inscriptions. Two years after he had solemnly repeated this confession, a M. St. Martin announced that he had made the same discovery as Grotefend, which he professed to have reached by an entirely different and far more scientific method: a circumstance which, if true, would have afforded a strong confirmation of the reality of the original discovery. St. Martin was born in 1791, and died of cholera in 1832, at the early age of forty-one. He rose from a comparatively humble sphere of life, and the aristocratic prefix to his name seems to have been merely assumed. He was for a time a traveller to his father, who was a tailor, but his talent for languages soon transferred him from the mercantile to the learned world, and, combined with his strong Monarchical opinions, enabled him to secure a fair amount of success. He was especially devoted to Oriental studies, and he learned Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Armenian; but his attainments seem to have struck his contemporaries as more pretentious than profound. He was appointed, when only nineteen, to be secretary to the Society of Antiquaries (1810), and at thirty-one he became Curator of the Library of the Arsenal (1824) and afterwards an Inspector of the Royal Printing House, a position that enabled him to introduce the Zend and cuneiform type. He was a very precocious scholar, for one of the writings on which his fame rests was published at the age of twenty—‘Egypt under the Pharaohs’ (1811). Seven years later his most important work appeared: ‘An Historical and Geographical Memoir on Armenia’ (1818). He is remembered also as one of the founders of ‘L’Universel’ (1829), a strong organ of the Legitimist party. His paper on the cuneiform inscriptions was read before the Académie des Inscriptions, of which he was a member, in 1822, and it was afterwards published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (February 1823). A more detailed account of his discoveries was promised, but it never seems to have appeared; and the only other authoritative expression of his opinion occurs in Klaproth’s ‘Aperçu de l’Origine des diverses Ecritures’ (1832), where we are favoured with the latest development of his cuneiform alphabet. His treatment of this subject is not calculated to raise his reputation as a scholar; and it certainly exposes him to the charge of want of candour.