admitting, in its fullest extent, the resemblance of some of the numerals used by the two nations, in the shape of the character, and of others in the sound, it certainly cannot be assumed to prove any thing beyond a mere accidental coincidence. The earliest accounts of China, after the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, being written by Portuguese missionaries, and the Chinese proper names still remaining to be spelt in the letters of that alphabet, have led several etymologists into great errors, not only with regard to the letter X, but more particularly in the _m_ final, and the _h_ incipient, the former being pronounced _ng_, and the latter with a strong aspirate, as _sh_. Thus the name of the second Emperor of the present dynasty is almost universally written in Europe _Cam-hi_, whereas it is as universally pronounced in China _Caung-shee_. The learned Doctor seems to be still less happy in his next conjecture, where he observes that, as the Romans expressed their _five_ by simply dividing the X, or ten, so also the ancient character signifying _five_ with the Chinese was X or ten between two lines thus [Illustration] indicating, as it were, that the number ten was divided in two; the Doctor seems to have forgotten that he has here placed his cross in the _Roman_ form, and not as the Chinese write it; and it is certainly a strange way of cutting a thing in two, by enclosing it between two lines; but the learned seldom baulk at an absurdity, when a system is to be established. The Chinese character for five is 五. Of all deductions, those drawn from etymological comparisons are, perhaps, the most fallacious. Were these allowed to have any weight, the Chinese spoken language is of such a nature, that it would be no difficult task to point out its relationship to that of every nation upon earth. Being entirely monosyllabic, and each word ending in a vowel or a liquid, and being, at the same time, deprived of the sounds of several letters in our alphabet, it becomes necessarily incapable of supplying any great number of distinct syllables. Three hundred are, in fact, nearly as many as an European tongue can articulate, or ear distinguish. It follows, of course, that the same sound must have a great variety of significations. The syllable _ching_, for example, is actually expressed by fifty-one different characters, each having a different, unconnected, and opposite meaning; but it would be the height of absurdity to attempt to prove the coincidence of any other language with the Chinese, because it might happen to possess a word something like the sound of _ching_, which might also bear a signification not very different from one of those fifty-one that it held in the Chinese.