[34.]
This will do, my dear M. To-morrow early I will send you the fifth chapter, printed, for correction, and expect your other chapter. Concerning A., it is clear you must write that chapter, for A. can do it as little as I. So let me have that too. In the Catalogue of the examples for “Grimm's Law,” get everything ready, and I will then send you the sheet, that you may enter the additions and corrections,—or, better still, you can send me the additions and corrections first, and I will have them inserted at once. Please do this.
[35.]
Your MS., my dear friend, is just dispatched to the printer, with the order to send the proof of the whole chapter direct to you at Oxford. Send the Mongolian chapter as soon as you conveniently can, but not sooner; therefore, when your head is more free. The printing goes on, and it cannot be paged till your chapters are ready, and also I hope the Italian one from Aufrecht, to whom I am writing about it to-day. He can send it to me in German. You must give him some help as to the length and form. It is best for him, if I personally introduce him to the English public, amidst which he now lives, and to which he must look for the present. So I hope to receive a real masterpiece from the Oxford Mission of German Science.
Vale. Cura ut valeas. Totus tuus.
[36.]
“As to the language of the Achæmenians, represented to us by the Persian texts of the Cuneiform inscriptions”—so I began this morning, determined to interpolate a paragraph which is wanting in your beautiful chapter, namely, the relationship of the language of the inscriptions to that of the Zend books, including the history of the deciphering with Grotefend in the background, at the same time avoiding the sunken rocks of personal quarrels (Burnouf contra Lassen). My young house-pundit gives the credit to Burnouf (as he first informed Lassen of the idea about the satrapies). However, it seems to me only natural that you should write the conclusion of this chapter yourself. I shall also write a short chapter on Babylon, for which I have still to read Hincks only, an uncomfortable author, as he has no method or clearness, probably also therefore no principles.
Now let us make this little book as attractive and useful to the English as we can; for that is really our mission.
Böticher asks if you do not wish to say something on the two dialects of Zend, discovered by Spiegel,—an inquiry which delights me, as Bötticher and Spiegel are at war, and in German fashion have abused each other.