1883 .] Analyses of Books, 417 
yet blue as a thing may be found in them.” Thus the Egyptian 
name for blue is khesbet, i.e., lazulite. It may in one sense be 
considered a digression, but we cannot help pointing out the 
utterly fallacious character of the inference that because a certain 
race of men had no distindt, definite word for a colour, they were 
therefore incapable of distinguishing such colour. We find that 
insedts recognise and remember colours. Are we to suppose 
that they have, therefore, a nomenclature for colours ? We highly 
specialised men of civilised Europe and America can distinguish 
and carry in our memory hundreds of odours, pleasant or offensive. 
Yet our names for them are few indeed, and so vague and indefi- 
nite, that we once heard a man speak of a “ heavy sweet smell, 
like dung.” He was not joking. It is much the same with 
flavours. Here, also, Mr. Massey very justly says — “ Power of 
perceiving qualities and distinguishing things does not depend 
on the possession of words to express shades of difference. 
Sweet could be distinguished from bitter when the one was only 
expressed by the mouth watering and a smack of gustativeness ; 
the other by spitting, with the accompaniment of an interjection 
of repugnance. . . . The early men thought in things and 
images where we think in words, or think we think.” Leibnitz 
said that the writing of the Chinese might seem to have been 
invented by a deaf person, its formation being so near to that of 
gesture-signs addressed to the eye. The oldest Chinese charac- 
ters, two hundred in number, are called Siang-Hing , — that is, 
images or ideographic representations. Elsewhere the author 
remarks — “ Verbs would be first enacted before they were uttered 
in what we could recognise as speech. A pair of feet Going is 
the sign of the verb to Go, and Going pourtrayed in several 
forms preceded any abstract verb for to Go.” 
Turning reluctantly from the seCtion on the typology of lan- 
guage, which must ultimately give comparative philology a new 
departure and a more rational character, we briefly glance at the 
author’s labours in other, though kindred, directions. In his ex- 
position of the genesis of the Kamite typology, Mr. Massey says 
that the unwritten, esoteric teaching of the Gnosis, the Kabalah, 
the inner mysteries, was concealed, not on account of its pro- 
fundity, but because of its primitiveness. “ It is not the ancient 
legends that lie ; the creators of these did not deal falsely with 
us. The falsehood is solely the result of ignorantly mistaking 
mythology for revelation and historical truth. They did not 
teach geology in the ancient mysteries. The Christian world 
assumed that they did, and therefore it was found in opposition 
to scientific geology.” 
The following passage is very significant : — “ The religious 
ritual of the moderns is crowded like a kitchen-midden with the 
refuse relics of customs that were once natural, and are now 
clung to as if they were supernatural in their efficacy, because 
their origin is unknown. Such customs are like those rudiment- 
