122 



NATURE 



[June 7, 1888 



unless the spending of this is placed under the definite 

 control of the ratepayers ; the other will not permit the 

 Board schools to reap a distinct advantage which is 

 withheld from those carried on by voluntary enterprise. 

 The Bill of the Association summarily cuts the Gordian 

 knot by specifically excluding voluntary schools from 

 participation in income derived from the rates ; naturally, 

 therefore, denying to any higher institution of a 

 distinctly denominational type similar assistance. Sir 

 Hart Dyke's Bill, on the other hand, having in its first 

 clause declared that "Any School Board in England may 

 from time to time supply or aid the supply of such manual 

 or technical instruction, or both, as may be required for 

 supplementing the instruction given in any public ele- 

 mentary school in its district, whether under its own 

 management or not," goes still further in its second clause, 

 and makes distinct provision as to the equality of treatment 

 between Board schools and voluntary schools such that, 

 if the Board aids its own schools, " it shall, on the request 

 of the managers of any other public elementary school 

 in its district fulfilling like conditions as to the supply of 

 manual or technical instruction in that school, aid the 

 supply of such instruction in that school in like manner as it 

 aids such supply in the school or schools underitsown man- 

 agement,subject to such terms as may be agreed on or deter- 

 mined inpursuance of this Act." Moreover, if the managers 

 object to these terms, the Department of Science and Art 

 shall act as umpire. The support or opposition to this 

 Bill by those who object to payment from the rates with- 

 out representation, and therefore the probable success or 

 defeat of the measure, will, we venture to think, much 

 depend upon the exact meaning which the Government 

 attaches to these " terms of agreement." If the expres- 

 sion may be taken to mean that the School Board shall 

 have some direct representation by its members on the 

 governing body of the voluntary schools to whom that 

 Board makes grants, qua the technical instruction given 

 in such schools, some of the opposition may possibly be 

 removed. But this should be distinctly expressed ; in- 

 deed, it would be better to make such an arrangement 

 imperative. If this meaning is not to be attached to 

 these words, we fear that the Bill will lose the support 

 of very many ardent educationalists in the House. 



Another provision which we do not find in the Govern- 

 ment measure is the one contained in the third clause of 

 the Association Bill, and also in the fourth clause of the 

 Government Bill of last year, in which School Boards 

 may join together to contribute towards the promotion 

 of technical instruction, power being already possessed 

 for this purpose by local authorities under the Public 

 Libraries Acts. This power, in the case of small or 

 sparsely-populated districts, is especially important, with 

 a view to the foundation of higher elementary technical 

 schools, which from their nature do not need to be very 

 numerous, and which the, School Boards of many of the 

 single areas of ihe kind included in the Bill would be 

 quite unable to create or maintain. 



The above by no means exhausts the points which 

 may be brought up for discussion on this Bill. It will, 

 however, serve to show the general scope of the Bill, 

 which, unless greatly modified, cannot, we fear, be 

 considered a satisfactory one. 



OLD BAB YLON/AN AND CHINESE 

 CHARACTERS. 



The Old Babylonian Characters and their Chinese Deri- 

 vates. By Terrien de Lacouperie. (London : Nutt, and 

 Triibner and Co., 1888.) 



PROF. TERRIEN DE LACOUPERIE has long been 

 known as the advocate of a theory which would bring 

 the ancestors of the Chinese from Western Asia, and see in 

 the characters they employed derivatives from the cuneiform 

 symbols once in use in Babylonia. The proofs of his 

 theory have been gradually placed before the learned 

 world. In two articles published in the Journal of the 

 Royal Asiatic Society he has endeavoured to trace the 

 history of the Yh-King, the oldest and most mysterious 

 of Chinese books, and to show that its earliest portions 

 contain lists of characters and their meanings, ancient 

 poems and similar fragments of antiquity, misunderstood 

 and misinterpreted by successive generations of com- 

 mentators. Elsewhere he has given us for the first time a 

 rational account of the vicissitudes undergone by the 

 Chinese system of writing, based upon the statements of 

 the Chinese writers themselves. Lately he has communi- 

 cated to the Philological Society an interesting and 

 exhaustive description of the languages spoken in China 

 before the arrival of the " Bak" tribes or Chinese proper, 

 as well as of the modern dialects which are descended 

 from them. Now we have the last instalment of his 

 proofs in the shape of a comparison between the primitive 

 forms of the Chinese characters and the pictorial forms 

 out of which the cuneiform script subsequently developed. 

 Prof, de Lacouperie claims to have proved in a typical 

 number of instances that the correspondence is exact, 

 or fairly so, as regards form, signification, and phonetic 

 value ; and that consequently an early connection between 

 Chinese and Babylonian must be assumed. Since the 

 Babylonian forms can be shown to presuppose those of 

 China, we must bring the Chinese from the West, and not 

 conversely the Babylonians from the East. 



I am not a Sinologist, and therefore can pronounce no 

 opinion on the Sinological side of the argument. Chinese 

 scholars must determine how far Prof, de Lacouperie's 

 restoration of the primitive forms and values of the 

 Chinese signs is correct. Assuming it to be so, the 

 resemblance between many of them and the corresponding 

 characters of Accadian Chaldaea is certainly surprising. 



On the Babylonian side, Prof, de Lacouperie has been 

 at great pains to secure accuracy, and has left but little to 

 criticize. Zik, however, it may be observed, is not a 

 value of the Babylonian ideograph of " ship," but goes 

 back to an erroneous conjecture of Dr. Hincks ; and the 

 original meaning of the character which has the value of 

 pa was " the leaf " or " leafy branch " of a tree. 



The Babylonians seem never to have forgotten that the 

 cuneiform characters they used had originated in pictures. 

 Indeed, their scribes long claimed the privilege of adding 

 to them, the result being that hieroglyphic forms took their 

 place in the texts by the side of forms that had long de- 

 generated into a cuneatic shape. The original hierogly- 

 phics had been the invention of the so-called Accadians, 

 the early population of Chaldaea, who spoke agglutinative 

 dialects, and were eventually superseded by the Semites- 



