156 REPORT — 1860. 



tour lines and laying down auxiliary contours. It has not, however, been thought 

 advisable to do more, as otherwise the pupils would avail themselves of these facilities 

 to too great an extent. A small instrument for measuring the gradients, and a scale 

 showing the intensity of the shading (hachorres) for various degrees of acclivity, are 

 to be made use of in copying the models. The author believes that the use of 

 models, judiciously selected, will engage the pupil's uninterrupted attention ; he will 

 overcome mechanical difficulties with greater facility, and will not be so wearied as 

 by the tedious, but abortive, and, in reality, useless attempts to copy a topographical 

 drawing placed before him. The author would add, that his models have been made 

 of galvanoplastic copper, and are therefore not so liable to breakage as plaster-of- 

 Paris models. 



On the Arrangement of the Forts and Dwelling -places of the Ancient Irish. 

 By the Rev. Professor Graves, M.A. 



On certain Ethnological Boulders and their probable Origin. 

 By the Rev. Emv. Hincks, D.D. 



The author began by observing that, if a geologist weie to see a mass of stone 

 lying in a place where all the rocks around were of a totally different character, he 

 would not be satisfied till he had accounted for its being there ; till he had found 

 whence it came, and at what period, and by what agency it was brought. He be- 

 lieved that like inquiries should be made, and might be answered, respecting ethno- 

 logical boulders ; by which he understood words occurring in writings of remote 

 antiquity, which were of a totally different character from the words of which the 

 writings were mainly composed. He believed that it would be possible, by help of 

 these boulders, to trace the people to whose language the words belonged, along the 

 line by which they must have travelled, forward to the point where their migration 

 terminated, and backward to that where it must have commenced. In the pre- 

 sent paper he proposed to do this in a particular case, the discussion of which 

 was peculiarly appropriate to the present meeting, as it related to that language, a 

 proficiency in which was the acknowledged glory of Oxford. 



The language of the Assyrian inscriptions is of the family called Semitic, that is, 

 of the same family with Hebrew ; and by the way it resembles this language in some 

 important particulars, such as having a Niphhal conjugation, more closely than it does 

 any other known language of that family. It is remarkable also that the copious 

 inscriptions which exist in this language were all written between the writing of the 

 earliest and the writing of the latest books of the Old Testament ; so that it would 

 seem that no language could be expected to clear up what is obscure in these books 

 so well as the Assyrian. 



In these Semitic inscriptions, however, numerous words are to be met with which 

 are evidently not Semitic. One class of such words was pointed out several years ago 

 by Sir Henry Rawlinson. They belonged to the language of Chaldea or Arcad, which 

 was spoken to the south of Assyria, and which he pronounced to be an Hamitic 

 language, akin to the Egyptian. 



In a paper read at the Dublin Meeting of the British Association in 1857, of which 

 a copious abstract is given, pp. 134-143 of the Report, Dr. Hincks took a very 

 different view of the matter. lie maintained that thisAccadian language represented 

 a sister language to that which is the common parent of all the Indo-European lan- 

 guages ; the common parent of these two, which he called the Japhetic language, 

 being a sister to the Egyptian language and to the common parent of all the Semitic 

 languages. He now affirmed that the views contained in that paper (with which he 

 must, for brevity, assume that his hearers were acquainted) were fully confirmed by 

 his subsequent researches, and that he had met with nothing inconsistent with 

 them. The linguistic pedigree there laid down was so fully established by induction 

 from a number of verbal pedigrees that it needed no further confirmation. Still, 

 comparisons of Indo-European words with words of one of the languages above 

 named, which was not Indo-European, would be found useful, and that in three 

 ways : — 



1. Such a comparison might establish the fact of a word having been in use in the 



