The Progress and Prospects of Oriental Discovery [pp. 476-493]

1875.] ORIENTAL DISCOVERY. 493,
presumptuous, if I say, that the course of lectures which I
have been permitted to inaugurate this evening, mark an era
in national education? I cannot express the gratification I
feel at the attendance which I see before me, so large beyond
my boldest expectations, and so encouraging to the success of
our work. A few years back, the languages and the literature,
which will be the subject of our studies, lay forgotten and unknown under the rubbish of centuries, or in the dusty corners of
European museums; still fewer years ago, they were but a
sealed book to all but one or two daring scholars, who alone
were attempting to penetrate their contents. Already, they
stand on a level with the manifold subjects of human knowledge, which are taught and learned; and the students who have
gathered this evening to help us in founding schools and educational courses of Assyrian and Egyptian philology, are a
token that a fresh start has been made in the education of the
country, and a fresh realm of conquest opened out before the
mind."
These anticipations can scarcely be regarded as too sanguine.
The progress that has already been made is a pledge that future efforts, under more encouraging circumstances and with
multiplied laborers in the field, will secure a still more abundant harvest. Motives of peculiar power and interest will conspire to urge forward this class of investigations. The growth
and history of language will be elucidated; scientific and com -
parative philology will be illustrated; and light will be thrown
upon some of the more abstruse problems in the science of
language. Besides all this, the contributions that will be made
to ancient history and to biblical interpretation and arch~ology
will be most valuable and important.
We may, therefore, confidently anticipate great and surprising results from future explorations of Egyptian, Assyrian, and
Chald~an monuments. We have gone far enough to stimulate, but not to satisfy, curiosity, while the encouragement to
investigation, far greater than it has ever been before, is stead
ily increasing.