same sound.
But with the Persian translation for a guide on the one hand, and the
Semitic languages, to which family the Assyrian belonged, on the other,
the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the leading investigators
being General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Mr. Fox-Talbot, in
England, Professor Jules Oppert, in Paris, and Professor Julian
Schrader, in Germany, though a host of other scholars soon entered the
field.

This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of the
nineteenth century. But so great a feat was it that many scholars of the
highest standing, including Joseph Erneste Renan, in France, and Sir G.
Cornewall Lewis, in England, declined at first to accept the results,
contending that the Assyriologists had merely deceived themselves by
creating an arbitrary language. The matter was put to a test in 1855
at the suggestion of Mr. Fox-Talbot, when four scholars, one being Mr.
Talbot himself and the others General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks,
and Professor Oppert, laid before the Royal Asiatic Society their
independent interpretations of a hitherto untranslated Assyrian text. A
committee of the society, including England's greatest historian of the
century, George Grote, broke the seals of the four translations, and
reported that they found them unequivocally in accord as regards their
main purport, and even surprisingly uniform as regards the phraseology
of certain passages--in short, as closely similar as translations from
the obscure texts of any difficult language ever are. This decision gave
the work of the Assyriologists official status, and the reliability of
their method has never since been in question. Henceforth Assyriology
was an established science.

APPENDIX

REFERENCE-LIST

CHAPTER I. MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES

(1) Robert Boyle, Philosophical Works (3 vols.). London, 1738.

CHAPTER II. THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN CHEMISTRY

(1) For a complete account of the controversy called the "Water
Controversy," see The Life of the Hon. Henry Cavendish, by George
Wilson, M.D., F.R.S.E. London, 1850.

(2) Henry Cavendish, in Phil. Trans. for 1784, P. 119.

(3) Lives of the Philosophers of the Time of George III., by Henry, Lord
Brougham, F.R.S., p. 106. London, 1855.

(4) Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, by Joseph
Priestley (3 vols.). Birmingham, 790, vol. II, pp. 103-107.

(5) Lectures on Experime