Anything so important, so new, and so excellent, as what you send me can never be too long. Your table is already gone to the printer. With regard to the general arrangement, I would ask you to keep the plan in mind.
1. That all references (as for instance the table of the forty-eight languages) belong to the Appendix or Appendices.
2. The arrangement of the leading ideas and facts to the text (Chapter X.).
3. Nothing must be wanting that is necessary for the establishing a new opinion.
Your tact will in all cases show you what is right. The justification of those principles you will assuredly find with me in the arrangement of all the other chapters, and of the whole work, as also in the aim in view, namely, to attract all educated [pg 427] Englishmen to these inquiries, and show them what empty straw they have hitherto been threshing.
Greet Aufrecht, and thank him for his parcel. I cannot arrange Chapter IV. till I have his whole MS. before me. I can give him till Tuesday morning.
The separate chapters (twelve) I have arranged according to the chronology of the founders of the schools. What is still in embryo comes as a supplement; as Koelle's sixty-seven African Languages, and Dietrich and Bötticher's Investigation of Semitic Roots. If your treatise is not so much a statement of Schott, Castrén, and Co. as your own new work, you shall have the last chapter for yourself.
And now, last but not least, pray send me a transliteration table, in usum Delphini. I will have it printed at the end of the Preface, that everybody may find his way, and I shall turn in future to it, and see that all transliterations in the book accord with it. I must ask for it therefore by return. You understand what we want. “A transliteration alphabet, for explaining the signs employed,” would be a good precursor to yours and Lepsius' scientific work. We shall do well to employ in the text as few technical letters as possible.
To-day I am going to see the “Bride of Messina” for the first time in my life. I have no idea that the piece can possibly produce any effect; and I am afraid that it may fail. But Devrient is of good courage.