from this to the decipherment of the names of Darius and Hystaspes. In one name only he differed from his predecessor. It will be remembered that Grotefend deciphered ‘Cyrus’ in the Murgab inscription. St. Martin preferred to transliterate ‘Houschousch’ and to read ‘Ochus’;[367] but in this single attempt at originality he turned out to be wrong and Grotefend right. He has spared us all the reasons that led him to these important results, as well as many grammatical and literary considerations which he promised to publish in a more extended Memoir. One success he may indeed claim. In reading the name of Hystaspes he compared it to a Zend form ‘Vyschtaspo,’ which gave a more correct result than the ‘Goshtasp’ of Grotefend.[368] This happy accident enabled him to assign the correct value of _v_ instead of _g_ to one cuneiform sign; and in the second letter of the same word he substituted _y_ for Grotefend’s _o_, and thereby approached nearer the correct value, which is _i_. These are the sole contributions he made to the work of decipherment. It must not, however, be supposed that his treatment of the alphabet was wanting in originality. It will be recollected that Grotefend was in possession of thirteen correct values; but of these St. Martin rejected five.[369] The eight that remained added to the two he determined himself (_v_ and _y_ or _i_) gave him an alphabet of ten correct values, as opposed to the thirteen in the possession of Grotefend. He altered the values Grotefend had incorrectly assigned to nine other characters, without making any improvement upon them.[370] He confessed with admirable modesty that there were twelve characters of which he could make nothing; and this struck Lassen as being the most satisfactory portion of his work.[371] Among them Grotefend had already condemned four as defective; one he had determined correctly as _f_, and he had nearly approximated to two others, _th_ for _t_ before _u_ (22) and _dj_ for _j_ before _i_ (32). St. Martin’s alphabet in its complete form consists of twenty-five letters, represented by twenty-seven cuneiform signs.[372] But of these letters he has three different modifications of the sound of _e_, which alone monopolise six cuneiform signs. Three signs are allotted to _h_, two to _a_, two to _ou_, two to _ch_, and two to _r_. In its latest form ten of the letters of our alphabet are left without equivalents in cuneiform—_b_, _f_, _g_, _i_, _l_, _q_, _u_, _w_, _x_, _z_. He was not, however, always without a _b_.[373] It was probably not till after 1826 that he saw reason to substitute an _m_. Rask had recently suggested that the word which Grotefend transliterated ‘Akeotchoschoh’ should be ‘Aqamnosoh,’ and signified ‘Achaemenian.’ St. Martin had no suspicion of this when he first wrote his paper, and he translated the phrase ‘race illustrious and very excellent.’[374] But when Klaproth appeared, in 1832, the transliteration and translation