is nearly perfect, except at the bottom, where several lines are wholly lost. The fourth column is worse than the second; ‘a fissure transects the tablet longitudinally,’ and in the lower half ‘the rock is more or less broken by the trickling of the water.’ But when we come to the fifth, we find ‘a state of such deplorable mutilation that it would be waste of time and ingenuity to undertake an analysis of the text, or to attempt anything like a connected and intelligible translation.’ In the face of these difficulties he was obliged to have recourse to very elaborate and ingenious restorations. At the end of the second column, for instance, he found the Susian copy perfect, and this enabled him to ‘restore’ the Persian text. It is one of the first instances of a long translation from the Susian, and his version of it turned out afterwards to be correct.[584] In the numerous repetitions that occur so frequently, he found a safe guide in other passages of the inscriptions. Sometimes, however, he had to work on much less solid foundation, as when he sought help from other sentences that were only ‘of nearly similar construction’; or when his restoration was ‘generally borne out by the context’; or merely by considerations of ‘grammatical propriety.’ In such cases he could never arrive at more than a high probability. He had frequently to measure the length of a blank and then tax his memory to supply one or more words with the required number of letters that would fit into the vacant place and at the same time make sense. Sometimes, as in the fourth column, the sense was so obscure that he feared his ‘restorations will be considered rather bold than felicitous.’[585] Occasionally his courage failed him altogether, and he was obliged to confess that ‘I cannot restore the [passage] even conjecturally.’ It is remarkable how uniformly successful his ‘conjectural restorations’ were found to be. He imposed the most admirable restraint upon the intuitive faculty with which he was so eminently gifted; and his emendations exhibit a patience and sobriety that many scholars engaged in similar work might advantageously study. When he had surmounted the imperfections of the text so far as possible, he set himself to the task of translation, and achieved the most notable success in this department of literature. When we consider that he had to unravel the intricacies of long sentences, determine the grammatical relations of multitudes of new words and fix their meaning by a patient comparison with Zend or Sanscrit analogies, the unfailing divination he displays is absolutely marvellous. A careful comparison of this first translation with that now accepted as correct will show comparatively few alterations, although the labours of many scholars have since been devoted to a rigorous study of the same text. The main body of the translation remains the same, word for word, down to the minutest particulars. Some doubtful passages, concerning