I 



to the Ethnological Society of London. 339 



branches of the subject, and particularly in the history of 

 the ancient Egyptian idiom, and the relation in which it 

 stands to the comparatively modern Coptic. He begins with 

 a sui'vey of the history of philological researches, in which 

 he reviews all that has been done, with any remai4iable suc- 

 cess, to advance this study, from the Cratylus of Plato to the 

 age of Adelung, who first set forth a systematic outline of the 

 " Sprachenkunde;" and again from that time to the era when 

 it was destined to assume the character of a new science in 

 the hands of Frederick Schlegel, Bopp, Grimm, and William 

 Von Humboldt. The investigations of these writers are car- 

 ried on by the Chevalier Bunsen to their ulterior results, so 

 far as these can be reached or anticipated by the most pene- 

 trating foresight. The languages of the Old Continent are 

 divided by him into three classes, which indicate, in a certain 

 point of view, so many successive stages of developement. 

 Two of these are the well-known Indo-European groupe, which 

 the author terms, with Schlotzer and others, the Japhetic 

 idioms, and the Semitic, Shemite, or Syro-Arabian lan- 

 guages. To each of these great stems are assigned geogra- 

 phical centres, as well as chronological periods of develope- 

 ment. A third and more ancient phasis of human language 

 is now revealed to our view, for the first time, by the author 

 of this memoir. It is represented by him as a more rudi- . 

 mental and imperfect organisation of articulate speech, but 

 as constituting the primitive material, as well as the common 

 groundwork, of both the later developements. It is termed by 

 the author, the Chamite system ; and it is said to be exempli- 

 fied or represented by the ancient Egyptian language. By 

 this it is not meant that Egypt was in reality the local centre 

 of its formation, but that the type of this earlier formation 

 has been longer preserved, like other remains of a remote an- 

 tiquity, in Egypt than elsewhere. These are the principal fea- 

 tures of the Chevalier Bunsen's theory, stripped of the magni- 

 ficent covering which the immense learning and the discur- 

 sive genius of the author has thrown round them. The same 

 volume of the Transactions of the British Association, in 

 which the Chevalier Bunsen's essay has just now appeared, 

 contains others read before the Section of Ethnology, some of 



