Hitherto China has yielded few sculptured figures which can be regarded as of importance by students of comparative archæology. More than usual interest therefore attaches to a set of engravings collected in a Chinese work entitled Shih Soh (1806), in which are represented a series of sculptures which stand on the walls of the sacrificial temple of the Wu family in the neighbourhood of the district city of Kia-seang in the province of Shan-tung. These works of art were executed in A.D. 147, at the cost of the two sons of Wu Liang, whose sacrificial temple they were intended permanently to adorn.

The mosque of Sultan Nasir ebn Kalaoun, which stands at the centre of Cairo citadel, although one of the most interesting in the city, seems to have received less attention than it deserves. This is probably due to the fact that, for many years past, it has ceased to be used as a mosque, and has been thrown into the background by the great Mosque of Mohamed Ali Pasha, which is visited by at least a thousand persons for every one who takes the trouble to enter the old royal mosque of the citadel.

The writer of this communication is the son of H. C. Von der Gabelentz; and is, like his distinguished father was before him, one of the most remarkable Linguistic Scholars of his time. He treats of a subject which is of the greatest importance, and which has this year been brought prominently to the notice of scholars by the Comparative Grammar of the Melanesian Languages compiled by the Rev. R. H. Codrington of the Melanesian Mission, and published by the Clarendon Press.

The following particulars on the origin and early history of the Banu ‘Oḳayl are from Ibn Khaldūn, vol. ii. p. 312, vol. vi. p. 11, etc. (Bulak Edition).

I may perhaps allow myself to begin by reminding the reader that Eastern writers invariably represent the Ismailian Arabs as the posterity of ‘Adnan, descendant of Ismail, and the people of each tribe as the actual children of one or other of the Arab Patriarch's posterity, after each of whom the tribe is usually named. But it is obviously unnecessary, to say the least of it, to regard the genealogies attributed to the tribes as anything more than the real or reputed pedigrees of their chiefs.

The Hebrews came in contact principally with two great nations of antiquity, the Egyptians and the Persians; at least it is with them mainly, if not solely, that their literature has preserved any traces of connection: and these traces are chiefly to be found in the books of Moses and in the books of Daniel, Ezra and Esther. As the Persian rule of Babylon did not begin till 536 B.C., one would suppose that the records of the earlier reigns of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar would not supply us with any words of Aryan derivation or connection, and this is undoubtedly a difficulty, as it is for many of the words we meet with in these records that such derivation has been suggested, or any such connection supposed.