138 CORRESPONDENCE. 



subjects, is it not indispensable to investigate human speech, which 

 is the medium of communicating those ideas ? If knowledge is of 

 any value, is not language, which is the instrument and the pre- 

 server of knowledge, entitled to our profoundest study ? 



But when we speak of results to be obtained by the pursuit of 

 any branch of science, no man can venture to predict what discov- 

 eries may be made in philology, any more than he could dare to do 

 in other departments of knowledge. Who could have foreseen, 

 for example, the incalculable results of Newton's studying the fall- 

 ing of an apple from a tree in his garden ? Who would ever have 

 imagined that the most astonishing and brilliant discoveries of Sir 

 Humphry Davy in chemical science, by the agency of galvanism, 

 would be deducible from observations of the convulsive motions of 

 a frog suspended from an iron -hook ? And, in the series of extra- 

 ordinary results of learned investigations, let me ask, Who would 

 have conjectured, in the study of languages, that any important 

 truths would ever be elicited by means of the hitherto mysterious 

 and dumb characters of the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt, 

 which scientific investigation is now beginning to unfold '? Yet 

 the discovery of the principles of interpretation to be applied to 

 those characters demolished, at a blow, the specious infidel super- 

 structure, which some men of science had previously erected upon 

 the hieroglyphic zodiac of Denderah; the true interpretation of the 

 language of that monument having proved it to be comparatively 

 modern, instead of being of an unfathomable antiquity, as had been 

 supposed by those philosophers, before the characters were at all 

 understood. 



By means of languages, too, we ascertain the affinities of 

 nations, however remote from each other ; a remarkable instance 

 of which is that singular race, the gypsies, (from their supposed 

 Egyptian origin) who are dispersed over Europe, and whose lan- 

 guage now shows them to be a people of Hindostan, and not of 

 Egypt. Tn the same manner, it appears that the people of Hun- 



