In his paper of January 1847 he increases his list of primary signs to ninety-five, and he analyses the remaining characters found in the East India House inscription published by Mr. Fisher in 1807. He thinks he has been able to assign values to a hundred and ninety-nine of these, and to attach them to some one or other of the ninety-five primary values to which, in his opinion, they corresponded. If this attempt had been successful, he would have arrived at the values of the whole of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs in Mr. Fisher’s list, and a few others in addition. But the paper in other respects indicates a retrograde tendency. ‘The language,’ he says, ‘has been brought to exhibit a much greater similarity to the Semitic ones than I had at first supposed.’ He accordingly abandons the ‘transcription of Babylonian words into Roman characters’ and assimilates them to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet.[782] He distributes the signs into classes according as he supposes them to be labials, gutturals, dentals, nasals, linguals and sibilants. He does not attempt to subdivide the classes into surds and sonants, but he separates each class into two divisions, according as he considers that the consonant is followed by _e_ (:_sheva_) or by _a_ (-_pathac_). ‘Values different from these are annexed to the characters which admit them.’ In so far as each sign is inseparably attached to one or other vowel the system remains syllabic; but his new table exhibits a strong desire to revert, if possible, to an alphabetical system in correspondence with the Hebrew. His study of the inscriptions at Van enabled him, even at this early date, to give ‘the mode of expressing numbers in cuneatic characters from 1 to 100,000’: a system he farther exemplified in his later paper on the Van inscriptions. His manipulation of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs induced him to take a much too favourable opinion of his own achievement, for we find him, in the course of the following year (May 1848), announcing that ‘the values of the great majority of the [Babylonian] characters are, in my judgment, already settled beyond the reach of criticism,’[783] a statement which we now know is, in fact ‘beyond the range of criticism.’ By that time he had, however, made the important discovery that Sennacherib and Esarhaddon were the builders of the two palaces at Nineveh. He would not, however, admit that Sargon was the Khorsabad king, a fact that had just been demonstrated with remarkable ingenuity by Longpérier.[784] Hincks suggested that the proper reading was Ni-Shar. It is worthy of remark that the writings we have just reviewed of Hincks, in 1846-7, were brought to the notice of Continental students by Mohl, in his ‘Rapport’ to the Société Asiatique of 1848.