The Birds of the Assyrian Monuments and Records. 119 
illustrate this paper. I also express my gratitude to 
Mr. Sayce, who, as always, has helped me much, and to 
Mr. Pinches. We wait only for more, and more variable 
material from Mesopotamia, for further progress in Assyrian 
studies. Thanks to the genius of Sayce, Pinches, Lenormant, 
Schrader, Delitzsch, Haupt, Lotz, Hommel, and others, whose 
critical skill, combined with the most praiseworthy and 
cautious system, is conspicuous, real lasting difficulties can 
hardly be expected to occur which their efforts will not be 
able to surmount. May ever-increasing success long inspire 
future researches and achieve noble results ! 
Additional Remarks. 
Note on the character >-^^, and on the Bird Sz| HfTT* 
Since writing on the bird denoted in the Accadian Column 
by the sign 2z| I have discovered that Mr. Boscawen 
(" Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch.," Vol. VI. Part 1, page 276) insists 
strongly on the original meaning of the character >~^£^ as 
denoting not the ordinary solar light, but the lightning or 
thunderbolt, as shown by the hieroglyphic picture of this sign 
as it appears in Chaldean signet-rings. This idea of fire 
being produced by boring into wood, is, as Mr. Boscawen has 
admirably shown, expressed by the ideographs of this element, 
>^-, and ^Z^^y ; the first part of the compound 
character fz^ intimates that " wood" has something to do 
with the fire, the second sign exhibits pictorially in its oldest 
form the actual operation of the fire-stick, as I have pointed out 
in a previous paper ("Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch.," Vol. VI, p. 466), 
and also intimates the same idea in one of the meanings of the 
sign cararu, "to revolve"; while the fifth month of the Accadian 
calendar, ^^^y JZ^^^y ^ ne-ne-gar, " fire makes fire," was 
under the patronage of the deity Nin-gis-zi-da, " Lord of the 
wood of life." The woodpecker by boring was supposed to 
