Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/226

Rh subject is not calculated to raise his reputation as a scholar; and it certainly exposes him to the charge of want of candour.

He is good enough to begin the account of his original discoveries by a reference to the previous labours of Grotefend, of which he had a very poor opinion. He has seen the analysis of Grotefend's system given by Tychsen in the 'Göttingen Gazette' of September 1802, and the Essay of De Sacy, written in the following year. These publications, he says, produced little impression at the time, and they were farther discredited by Grotefend's own contribution to Heeren, in 1805. None of the papers since contributed by Grotefend to periodical literature have shown any improvement upon his earliest writings, and St. Martin lays it down that the contents of the inscriptions are rightly regarded as still wholly unknown. But in addition to this unfavourable opinion, which was shared also by De Sacy, he brings charges of his own against Grotefend's system that are wholly without foundation. He accuses him of frequently varying the values he assigned to the characters, whereas it was in consequence of the extreme tenacity with which he clung to the values he originally assigned that his progress was in great measure arrested. St. Martin says Grotefend attributed five or six entirely different values to the same character, and that he considered that each character is susceptible of assuming a variety of different forms, both statements being equally without foundation. He affects to regard the corrections introduced into the texts by Grotefend—which is one of his most valuable serices—as purely arbitrary,