one letter should have only a single sound, and two or more letters can never denote one and the same sound.’ The last maxim was not, however, verified, for it is found that some letters are represented by two and even three signs, according to the vowel they precede. He added the useful warning that the language of the inscription is probably Old Persian, and not, therefore, identical with the language of Zoroaster. Hence, while they are similar, and may be usefully compared, it by no means follows that the grammatical forms and the vocabulary are always identical.[382] We now come to the two great scholars, Burnouf and Lassen, to whom, after Grotefend, the decipherment of the cuneiform is chiefly to be ascribed. Eugène Burnouf was the son of a distinguished father, who was a Professor at the Collège de France. Eugène was born in 1801, and died in 1852. At the age of twenty-five he acquired a great reputation for Oriental scholarship by the publication of his essay ‘Sur le Pali,’ which he wrote in collaboration with Lassen.[383] But his fame rests principally upon his Zend studies, the first of which, the Vendidad, appeared in 1830. More than a hundred years had elapsed since the first copy of the original text was brought to Europe by George Bouchier, an Englishman (1718), who had obtained it from the Parsees at Surat. Bouchier presented it to the University of Oxford, where it might be seen long afterwards chained to a wall in the Bodleian. No one, however, could read a word of it. At length a young Frenchman, Anquetil de Perron, determined if possible to overcome the difficulty. He went to Surat in 1758, and put himself under the tutorship of the learned Parsees. He was, however, surprised to find that, although they knew the value of the characters, they were completely ignorant of the language itself. Yet their sacred books were written in it, and they daily recited the meaningless sounds in their ritual. It was sufficient, they said, that God should understand the prayers they were enjoined to repeat. By an ingenious comparison with the Pehlevi and Persian vocabularies Anquetil at length arrived at a probable translation; and after his return to Paris he published a French version of the Zend-Avesta (1771).[384] His work was very unduly depreciated by Sir W. Jones, the leading English Orientalist, but it attracted a larger degree of esteem on the Continent, and a German edition by Kleuker appeared at Riga, in 1777, which enjoyed a fair amount of popularity.[385] Both the language and the subject-matter of the Zend-Avesta began to receive the attention of scholars, and those especially who were interested in cuneiform recognised their importance. Tychsen, for example, wrote on the religion of Zoroaster,[386] and Rask on the relation of the language to Sanscrit;[387] and the same conjunction of studies was preserved in later times by Burnouf, Westergaard, Oppert and Spiegel. Down to the time of