in the triple Inscriptions of the Persians, &c. 307 
found destitute of the benefit of this invaluable instrument of human learning. 
A people, indeed, who had long been accustomed to the employment of idea- 
grams, might from prejudice refuse admittance to an alphabetic method of de- 
signation, or, after its introduction, so, from ideagraphic habits, deteriorate and 
corrupt its nature, as gradually to render it useless, and finally abandon it. But 
none who had begun with this species of writing would ever have given it up 
for any other kind. 
19. The last topic to which I shall here advert is the extremely vague, inde- 
finite, and, consequently, useless nature assigned to the Babylonian, and third 
Persian kind of cuneiform writing, by such persons as assume the meaning of 
legends in which the characters belonging to those kinds are respectively em- 
ployed, to be phonetically conveyed. M. Salvolini’s attempt to decipher and 
interpret three of the shortest lines of the Rosetta inscription, on a similar sup- 
position with respect to the mode of their ingredients being significant, bears 
just im like manner against the application of the phonetic theory to the hiero- 
glyphic system of the Egyptians; as has been, | will venture to say, fully shown 
in the first chapter of the second part of my Work. But the argument tells with 
much greater force in the present instance ; as the authors who have endeavoured 
to resolve specimens of the two cognate kinds of writing, now under considera- 
tion, into letters, have displayed far superior talents for such an undertaking ; and 
the circumstance of their resorting to plans of operation that have the effect of 
representing the writing of each kind as totally unsuited for use, is not to be 
attributed to any deficiency of acuteness or skill on their part, but solely to the 
absolute impossibility of making it out legible, consistently with the assumption 
of its being phonetic. 
Respecting the powers of the cuneiform letters of the Babylonians, Doctor 
Hincks gives us the following information, in a paper of his which was read at 
the last meeting of the Academy in 1846. ‘A character which represents a 
consonant followed by a, generally loses its vowel, if it precedes a character in 
the same word which represents any syllable beginning with the same consonant ; 
and a character which represents a consonant followed by wu, generally loses its 
vowel, if it precedes a character of the same value [that is, in such instances, the 
character referred to is, at the beginning of a group, stripped of all power, and, 
in other positions, is reduced from a syllabic sign to a consonant]. In these 
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