been since over-ruled. He recognised that there was no difference between the surd and sonant consonants at the beginning of a word, and he agreed with Westergaard that the double letter in the middle emphasised the hard sound. He saw also that the same sign was used equally to express the Persian _m_ and _w_; and that ‘the aspirate, which is quite uncertain, must also be disregarded.’ He accepted the two determinative signs already admitted by Westergaard, and also the determinative before the words for ‘god’ and ‘heaven’ which had been pointed out by Hincks.[655] He also recognised the ideogram for ‘month.’ The gradual recognition of the similarity of a large number of the Median and Babylonian signs was at length beginning to bear fruit. Norris indicates a resemblance between nearly fifty in his list of one hundred and three signs.[656] Twenty of these are indeed ‘identical’ in form, and independent investigation proved that they conveyed the same sound in both languages. In the others the similarity was sufficiently striking to afford an important confirmation of the values arrived at by the study of the text. Indeed in a few cases—such, for example, as the _e_ already mentioned, the similarity to the form of a Babylonian character was the only clue to the value of the Median sign.[657] If he had allowed himself to be more influenced by the Babylonian script he would have slightly increased the number of his correct values;[658] though, on the other hand, a too rigorous adherence to this rule might have landed him in some errors. He hazarded the important statement, subsequently so remarkably confirmed, that there are evident signs that the syllabarium had been originally devised to express a Scythic tongue,[659] for, he said, ‘the unchangeable roots, the agglutinative structure and the simple syllabisation of such tongues are perfectly suited to such a mode of writing, while the Semitic and Indo-Germanic cannot without the most awkward and unsystematic arrangements be represented by it.’ He considered that the language of the second column must have been that of the pastoral tribes of Persia; and he pointed out that the omission from the Median text of the names of the districts in which Otiara and Rhages are placed showed that those towns were well known where the language was spoken, and it also afforded some evidence of the area it covered. On the other hand, the discovery of Scythic inscriptions at Susa seemed to point no less emphatically to its southern range, and the possibility presented itself that that was the source from which it spread. De Saulcy farther showed that a close analogy might be traced to Turkish; but Norris was the first to point out that its nearest modern relationship is with the Volga-Finnish branch of the Scythic family, and that it bears a close resemblance to the language now spoken by the Finns.[660]