2oO THEOPHILUS G. PINCHES, ESQ., LL.D., M.R.A.S., OX 



with a congress is listening to all the speeches of salutation or 

 greeting which are given, at the first plenary meeting, ])y the 

 representatives of the various governments. There were at 

 the Hamburg Congress fifteen of them, and what they had to 

 say, with the addresses of the president and vice-president 

 (Herr Senior D. Behrmann and Burgomaster Dr. Monkeberg), 

 who, with the other vice-presidents, were then elected, brought 

 up the total of the speeches to about twenty. The listener can- 

 not escape from the feeling that such time might be better 

 spent. Nevertheless, one feels naturally a certain amount of 

 interest on . such occasions when someone gets up to speak in 

 the English language (which happened fairly often), or when 

 the speaker made his remarks in a language seldom heard, as 

 did the Egyptian delegate, Ahmed Zeki Bey, who uttered his 

 words of salutation in Arabic, to the great gratification of all 

 those who know anything of that language. As to the speech 

 of the Chinese delegate, that was naturally for the extreme fev/, 

 but it was made comprehensible to most of the audience by 

 rendering into very excellent German by his Chinese inter- 

 preter. It was noted that some of the United States delegates, 

 even those with English names, sometimes preferred to speak 

 German. In the afternoon sectional meetings took place, so 

 that there w\as no loss of time in getting to work.* 



As it will be impossible for me to refer in detail to all the 

 papers which were read, 1 propose to speak of such of them as 

 may be regarded as of general interest to the members of this 

 Institute, though my own predilection will naturally he mani- 

 fest, especially as those which I heard were, to some extent, 

 papers dealing with my own subject, whilst the remainder 

 were related thereto more or less. Unlike other congresses, 

 of Orientalists which have been held, no short abstracts of 

 the papers have been issued, so that the general public and 

 the members of the Congress who were unable to attend all 

 the meetings find themselves in almost absolute ignorance 

 of the value of the papers which they were unable to 

 hear. The London Orientalist Congress held ten years agO' 

 was, in, this respect, far away in advance of that of Hamburg, 

 which cannot claim, therefore, to be a place where such things 

 are managed better. 



As, after the election of Professor Buhl as President of the 



It is worthy of notice, that this was the first Orientalist Congress at 

 which the Government of Ceylon has been represented, the delegate- 

 being Don Martino de Zilva Wickremasinghe. 



