Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/268

Rh was found to be the aspirate h. The remaining corrections are due to the ingenuity of Jacquet alone. Jacquet was born at Brussels, but the whole of his short life was spent at Paris, where he died in 1838 at the age of only twenty-seven. His extraordinary precocity and the wonderful range of his acquirements place him among the most remarkable men of his generation. He was distinguished at school by the critical accuracy of his classical knowledge, and by the zeal with which he applied himself to the geography, history and literature of ancient times. He had scarcely ceased to be a school-boy when we find him studying Oriental languages under the most distinefuished masters. He was the pupil of De Chézy in Sanscrit, of Silvestre de Sacy in Arabic and Persian, of Jaubert in Turkish, and Abel Rémusat in Chinese. - His studies travelled far beyond the ordinary course of even these learned professors, and embraced the various languages of India, the Malay Archipelago, Java, and even Ethiopia. At the same time he became familiar with most European languages, including Danish and Portuguese. At the age of eighteen, he began to contribute regularly to the 'Journal Asiatique.' It was in its pages that he published his 'Considerations on the Alphabets of the Philippines,' which appeared in 1831, when he had just reached the age of twenty. It at once attracted the attention of M. G. von Humboldt, who wrote to compliment the yoimg author, and who farther showed his appreciation by adopting in his own work most of