Borneo, like Celebes, teems with Natural History unknown to European science; and Mr. Brooke has sent some remarkable specimens to England, though his own large collection was, unfortunately, wrecked on its voyage homeward. Every arrival, however, is now adding to the stores we already possess. The British Museum has been much enriched, even within the last year, with rare specimens of zoology and botany; and at the Entomological Society there have been exhibited and described many curious insects hitherto strange and unclassified.

No. II.

PHILOLOGY.

It was intended in this work to convey to the studious in philology,—upon which science, rationally investigated, so much depends on our ability to ascertain the origin and trace the earliest relations of mankind,—as copious a vocabulary of the Dyak language, with definitions of meaning and cognate references, as might be considered a useful contribution to that important branch of learning. But various considerations have induced us to forego the design; and not the least of them has been, not the difficulty, but the impossibility of reducing the whole collection to a system, or of laying down any certain rule of orthography in this Oriental confusion. Nearly all the vowels, for example, have been found of equal value; and as they have but one general Malay name, so it happens that (for instance) the consonants b dmight be pronounced with the intervening sound, bad, bed, bid, bod, bud, and sundry variations beside, unknown to the English tongue. This will in a great degree account for the universally vexatious, because puzzling, spelling, inflections, and pronunciation of Eastern names, which is so injurious to the literature and knowledge of those countries among Europeans.

The vowel-sounds adopted are:

a like a in father.
e ” a in fan.
ĭ ” Italian i, or ee in thee.
ĭ ” i in pin.
o ” o in spoke.
u ” oo in cool.
ŭ ” u in run.
y occasionally like ĭ.
ow (ou) like ow in cow.

The final k in Malayan is frequently mute: thus Dyak is pronounced Dyaa, with the slightest possible aspiration.

gn is a liquid sound.

We add an alphabetical list of some of the words which have occurred in the preceding pages.

Arafuras, or Haraforas, natives of Papua.