Some of them, indeed, he made considerably worse, and added others of his own, so that, notwithstanding a few corrections, their number rose to seventeen. He, however, pointed out that there was a determinative before the words for ‘god,’ ‘Ormuzd’ and ‘heaven,’ contrary to the opinion of Westergaard; and that the group the latter had mistaken for the vowel a was precisely that sign. He was less successful in his classification of the language, which he could not accept as Scythic. He considered its affinity was with the Aryan family, but he could not find that any of the Indo-European languages had similar inflections.[640] A few years later De Saulcy wrote two articles in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ on the Median, without, however, making any important contribution to the subject.[641] His papers deserve notice chiefly on account of his eminence in other departments of study, and because he was the only Continental writer whose attention was directed at that time to this special branch of inquiry.[642] He thought he could recognise that it bore a close relationship to Persian, sufficient to justify the opinion of Strabo that the two languages were the same. Both Westergaard and Rawlinson had already observed that some of its grammatical forms and vocabulary could be best explained by reference to the modern Georgian and Turkish; and De Saulcy, notwithstanding his opinion of its affinity with Aryan, fully recognised that it had left traces in other quarters, including Kurd, Mongol, Armenian and the Gipsy tongue, but nowhere to a greater degree than in Turkish. He supports his opinion with a wealth of illustration drawn from these sources that must have fairly distracted his printer, and the indiscriminate use of the mechanism of philological dictionaries has in fact led the writer into many serious errors. He does not refer to Hincks, and notwithstanding all the resources at his command, he has fallen far short of the Irish writer whose country rectory was ill provided with these artificial appliances. De Saulcy has not, in fact, added a single correct value to those already known, and has failed to recognise several already established as correct. The utmost generosity cannot concede to him the possession of more than twenty-one correct values and nine nearly correct, all previously known; so that he had not more than thirty available for transliteration, as opposed to the twenty-nine of Westergaard and the forty-seven of Hincks. But he introduced a host of errors that are wholly his own. He assigned no less that thirty values that are absolutely wrong, although he only attempted sixty-two out of the eighty-two in Westergaard’s list. But it is not only in the details of decipherment that he went astray; his error covers the whole conception of the structure of the language. He has no less than fifteen different signs for vowels representing many fantastic gradations of sound. Different modifications of _a_ and _ou_ monopolise