301 
instead of thus circulating, converges to a limit, the general va- 
lue of 
10j \= 
ue- (52) ; 
was assigned for any arbitrary quaternion c, by the help of the 
quadratic equation 
9g’ =5qt+ 107; 
and it was shewn that with only one exception, namely, the 
case when c= (2k —47), the limit in question was (for every 
other value of c), 
The Rev. Dr. Todd read a paper on the Khorsabad in- 
scriptions, by the Rev. Dr. Hincks. This was the sequel to 
a paper read on the 25th of June, 1849, and printed in the 
_ twenty-second volume of the Transactions of the Academy. 
To that paper, which was chiefly occupied with the ideogra- 
_ phic element in the Assyrian inscriptions, and with chronolo- 
. gical investigations respecting them, an appendix was added, 
_ in which the phonetic characters were arranged. It was main- 
' tained that they were all syllabic, and that the elementary 
' syllables represented four vowels and seven different forms of 
combinations of a vowel and a consonant; all of which, how- 
eyer, were not in use in the case of every consonant, while 
_ some syllables had more than one representation. 
Up to the date of the publication of this paper, it was 
" maintained by all other writers on the subject that the elemen- 
i ary characters represented the letters of a Semitic alphabet, 
though it was not denied that some characters represented 
combinations of two others. After a considerable part of the 
‘present paper was written, Colonel Rawlinson, abandoning his 
former theory of the characters representing letters, proposed 
“syllabic values for them; he, however, admitted only three 
