During the last thirty years little of interest has happened in Georgia. The appointment of the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich to the lieutenancy of the Caucasus in 1862, the gradual freeing of the serfs, the construction of railway and telegraph lines of communication, the founding of one or two banks, schools, and other establishments of public utility, are the chief events which the annalist has to chronicle. "Free" Svaneti was conquered a few years ago, and, for the present, Russia's supremacy is undisputed as far as the frontiers of Turkey and Persia. Even the last war between Russia and Turkey was not accompanied by any visible commotion among the peoples of the Caucasus. There is as yet no history of Georgia in the sense in which we now understand the word. Those works which are dignified with the name are merely more or less trustworthy collections of materials, which in their present form produce only a feeling of bewilderment in the reader. We trust that a man worthy of the task will seriously take the annals of his nation in hand, and present them to the world in an intelligible form; and we also cherish the hope that he will not finish his task without being able to chronicle the new birth of a strong, independent state worthy to maintain the fame of Irakli and Tamara. THE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF GEORGIA. The origin of the Kartlian or Kartvelian language is still involved in some doubt, but the general opinion of philologists seems to be that it does not belong to the Indo-European family, although it has been powerfully influenced by Zend, Sanskrit, Persian, and Armenian. The ancient speech of the country is preserved to us in the ecclesiastical rituals and books of devotion, which are written in characters differing very considerably from the civil alphabet, the "war hand," the invention of the latter being ascribed to King Pharnavaz I., a contemporary of Alexander the Great. The Khutsuri, or ecclesiastical character, bears a striking resemblance to Armenian; an excellent specimen of it may be seen in the British Museum Library, in the famous Moscow Bible of 1743, recently purchased. The number of letters is the same in both alphabets, viz. thirty-eight, and the modern alphabet is as follows:-- a b g d e v z é (short) th (not English th but t followed by sound of h) i (English ee) c l m n i (short) o p zh r s t u (oo) vi (vee) ph (p followed by sound of h) k gh (guttural) _ (something like a guttural k) sh ch tz dz ts dch kh khh j h ho The orthography is purely phonetic. There is very little difference between the language of the sacred books and that of to-day, not nearly so much as between Anglo-Saxon and English; but many foreign words have been introduced in modern times.