At the period Pliny wrote his Natural History, the whole coast of Arabia appears to have become tolerably well known to the Greeks and Romans. With the western and southern portions of the peninsula they had perhaps long been acquainted; but their knowledge of the eastern and more remote parts was of much more recent date. Regarding the history of their gradual acquisition of this knowledge, the light afforded us is very faint. Arrian mentions that the first attempt to sail round the Arabian Chersonese was made from the Red Sea in the hope of reaching the Persian and Susian shores, but that the expedition, after having coasted along the greatest part of Arabia, was compelled by want of water to sail back again. Who these navigators were, and by whose command they undertook the journey, he does not say, but it seems probable they came from Egypt.

It is one of several disadvantages which the island of Ceylon has had to endure in its political separation from the Anglo-Indian empire, that its language has until lately been left out of the category of Indian tongues, and has received but little attention, except from the few scholars whom so small a country has been able to produce. There has also been an unfortunate wrangling among those who have touched the subject as to whether Sinhalese is a Turanian or an Aryan tongue. This dispute has now for some time been settled in favour of the Aryan origin; and we can but repeat the surprise of Professor Childers that Mr. Beames should omit the Sinhalese in his “Comparative Grammar of Modern Aryan Languages of India.”

The term ‘Tibeto-Burman’ has latterly crept into use as a convenient designation of a very large family of languages which appear more or less to approximate to each other. They are those which Max Müller classes as Gangetic and Lohitic, names which, with all due reference to the learned Professor, really have little relevant meaning in this case.

In 1872 the Local Government of the province arranged to become purchaser of Dr. Mason's work on “Burma.” The author was an American missionary, who had spent nearly all his life in the country, and whose name is well known amongst Oriental scholars as having been the first to discover and bring to light Kaccayāno's Pali Grammar, which is to this day the handbook here in every village school. The last edition of “Burma” had been published in 1860. Since that date the writer had been amassing new collectanea, and it was agreed that he should personally supervise a fresh publication, which was intended, in his hands, to become a kind of encyclopædia of all scientific subjects connected with the province. But Dr. Mason was never destined to see the consummation of the work he had laboured at so long. For some time his missionary duties interfered with all active literary endeavour, and his death in 1874 finally prevented the execution of the original design. His notes and MSS., after remaining for three years in the possession of his widow, have been consigned by Government to one who is fully conscious how incompetent he is single-handed for the task.

Among the races now occupying the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, the oldest, the Mōn, has been little studied, and is generally passed over as an insignificant tribe of little interest in any way. Yet the facts which point them out as being the occupiers of the Delta of the Irrawaddy before the arrival of the Tibeto-Burman tribes, from whom they are quite distinct, seem worthy of consideration.

When we consider the progress made by comparative Indo-European philology, we can only wonder that even after the discovery of Assyrian, which undoubtedly represents the Sanskrit of the Semitic languages, no attempt has been made to form a comparative Semitic grammar. Assyrian has hitherto been regarded as at most useful for the explanation of certain questions of Hebrew lexicography; as for the morphology of the Semitic tongues, scholars have been content with simply stating the analogies which exist between Assyrian and the allied languages. The cause of this lies mainly in the fact that Assyrian is regarded as a corrupt branch of the Semitic family of speech; and much that is peculiar in its structure, the preservation of which really implies the highest antiquity, is treated as so many new formations, so that the possibility of properly utilizing Assyrian grammatical forms for the explanation of Semitic grammar is at the outset taken away. Hence, as long as such thoroughly perverse views are not given up, a scientific philology of the Semitic languages can never take its place by the side of that of the Indo-European languages.

A Year ago I had the honour of introducing to the Society M. Sauvaire's translation of Mar Eliyá's treatise on weights and measures, which appeared in Vol. IX. pp. 291–313 of the Journal. In the notes to that work reference was frequently made to the treatise on the Balance by Ḥasan El-Jabartí. Since then M. Sauvaire has completed a translation of a portion of the treatise, and has entrusted to me the agreeable office of presenting this new contribution to the Society.

One of the most interesting migrations on record is that of the Yuehti from their old seats in the north-west of China to the site of the Greek kingdom of Bactria. Its interest is increased rather than diminished by the fact that we can trace its origin by the aid of authentic records, as well as from the knowledge that it was but one in a series, the original exciting cause of which still remains veiled in an obscurity apparently only to be pierced, on the one hand, by the geologist who shall work out the changes in the physical geology of Asia, within the human period, or, on the other, by the comparative mythologist, who, placing side by side the myths and traditions of its ancient inhabitants, sees, though dimly, some sort of order rising out of what, at first sight, is a veritable chaos.