scoveries. The Pahlavi inscriptions
gave the key, as is well-known, to the Persian cuneiform inscriptions,
which were in return to put beyond all doubt the genuineness of the Zend
language.

Tychsen, in an appendix to his Commentaries, pointed to the importance
of the new discovery: "This," he writes, "is a proof that the Pahlavi
was used during the reign of the Sassanides, for it was from them that
these inscriptions emanated, as it was by them--nay, by the first of
them, Ardeshir Babagan--that the doctrine of Zoroaster was revived. One
can now understand why the Zend books were translated into Pahlavi.
Here, too, everything agrees, and speaks loudly for their antiquity and
genuineness."

About the same time Sir William Jones, then president of the Royal
Asiatic Society, which he had just founded, resumed in a discourse
delivered before that society the same question he had solved in such an
off-hand manner twenty years before. He was no longer the man to say,
"_Sied-il a un homme ne dans ce siecle de s'infatuer de fables
indiennes?_" and although he had still a spite against Anquetil, he
spoke of him with more reserve than in 1771. However, his judgment on
the "Avesta" itself was not altered on the whole, although, as he
himself declared, he had not thought it necessary to study the text. But
a glance at the Zend glossary published by Anquetil suggested to him a
remark which makes Sir William Jones, in spite of himself, the creator
of the comparative grammar of Sanscrit and Zend. "When I perused the
Zend glossary," he writes, "I was inexpressibly surprised to find that
six or seven words in ten are pure Sanscrit, and even some of their
inflexions formed by the rules of the Vyacaran, as yushmacam, the
genitive plural of yushmad. Now M. Anquetil most certainly, and the
Persian compiler most probably, had no knowledge of Sanscrit, and could
not, therefore, have invented a list of Sanscrit words; it is,
therefore, an authentic list of Zend words, which has been preserved in
books or by tradition; it follows that the language of the Zend was at
least a dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly to it as
the Pracrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken
in India two thousand years ago." This conclusion, that Zend is a
Sanscrit dialect, was incorrect, the connection assumed being too close;
but it was a great thing that the near relationship of the two languages
should have been brought to