“It were difficult, if not impossible, to define the qualities of mind which must inhere in the decipherer of a forgotten language. He is not necessarily a great scholar, though great scholars have been successful decipherers. He may know but little of the languages that are cognate with the one whose secrets he is trying to unravel. He may, indeed, know nothing of them, as has several times been the case. But the patience, the persistence, the power of combination, the divine gift of insight, the historical sense, the feeling for archæological indications, these must be present, and all of these were present in the extraordinary man, Grotefend, who now attacked the problem that had baffled so many.”
[372] Hilprecht, op. cit., p. 71; cf. A Memoir of Major General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, pp. 143–148, 153–157 (by his brother, Canon George Rawlinson, London, 1898); Booth, op. cit., pp. 106–114.
[373] Although it was supposed that this prize, awarded by so learned a body as the French Institute, would be tantamount to une sanction qui devrait dissiper toutes les susceptibilités, many remained as skeptical as ever and continued “to decry a language in which one can never know if a syllable is ideographic or phonetic, and, when phonetic, which of two or three different values it may have in that place.” Cf. A. J. Booth, op. cit., p. 416.
[374] Op. cit., pp. 118, 119.
[375] New Light on the Bible and the Holy Land, p. 10 (by B. T. Evetts, New York).
[376] The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 110 (by M. Jastrow, Philadelphia, 1915).
[377] A few years before his death, when presiding at the commencement exercises of the College of Dole, in the Department of the Jura in which he was born and brought up, Pasteur told his youthful audience: “When one has studied much, one comes back to the faith of a Breton peasant; as to myself, had I studied more I should have the faith of a Breton peasant-woman.” The Ave Maria, February 14, 1920.
[378] Bible, Science and Faith, p. 314, 315 (Baltimore, 1895). Cf. also Evolution and Dogma, Chap. VIII (by J. A. Zahm, Chicago, 1896).
[379] Babel und Bibel, p. 4 (Leipzig, 1903).
[380] A name which, as we have seen, is also applied to the Euphrates.