ON THE COMPARISON OF ASIATIC LANGUAGES. 2S 
The Presipent (Sir G. G. Srokes, Bart.)—Our thanks are 
certainly due to the author of this elaborate paper, but I may say 
you have anticipated me by your applause. Perhaps Dr. Legge 
will kindly open the discussion. 
Professor J. Lecce, D.D. (Oxford).—I understand the President 
desires that I should say something on the admirable paper that 
we have just heard. Iam hardly prepared to do so; not from 
want of attention to the subject, because it is one that for many 
years has been very much in my thoughts and at my heart; and 
although, unfortunately, as years have gone on, I have.become less 
capable of catching the language that has been used or spoken, yet 
I have had the privilege, through the kindness of the Honorary 
Secretary, of being in possession of the printed paper, and I must 
say I have read it many times over and tried to comprehend it, 
tried to learn from it, and tried if it would help me to focus many 
of the ideas that at different times have flitted through my mind: 
yet when I have tried to come to definite conclusions concerning 
the points that the author has endeavoured with so much pains, 
and often with so much success, to bring before us, I have found 
it is very difficult to arrive at any definite conclusion. 
We have much in the paper about a great many different lan- 
guages with some of which I am, or have been at different times 
of my life, tolerably familiar, and one of which has been the great 
study—shall I say bugbear ?—of my life for about sixty years. I 
mean the Chinese. What the author has said about the Chinese 
has interested me. Sometimes he has astonished me. It is not 
the first time that I have heard that Chinese is a very decayed 
language, and I have never been able to understand what is meant 
by thus characterising it. Does it mean that it is a very broken 
down language ? Well, it has never admitted of much breaking 
down, because in all the thousands of years of its existence it has 
never been but a monosyllabic language, and it seems to me to be 
very difficult to break down monosyllables and to speak of them as 
falling into decay. The language, moreover, as it is written 
at the present day, is very much as it was written and in 
construction about 1900 years before the Christian era, and it 
really places me in a difficulty to understand what philologists 
mean when they speak of the decayed language that has been 
cultivated in China for so many thousand years aud which has as 
many writers in it at the present day as many cf our alphabetic 
