The following persons were chosen Officers of the Society for the ensuing year: President.-PROF. EDWARD ROBINSON, LL.D., New York. Vice Presidents.-WM. JENKS, D.D., Boston. Prof. MOSES STUART, Andover. Hon. ALEXANDER H. EVERETT. Corresponding Secretary.-EDWARD E. SALISBURY, New Haven. RUFUS ANDERSON, D.D., Boston. The Society then adjourned. September 29. 1847.-A Quarterly Meeting of the Society was held this day at the Rooms of the American Academy in Boston. Rev. Dr. Jenks in the chair. Letters were read: From Mr. S. Hernisz, acknowledging his election into the Society;-From Professor De Wette of Basle, of like purport, and expressing a desire to promote the objects of the Society in any way possible;-From Richard Clarke, Esq., Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, of like purport, in which he says: "I beg you will assure the honorable Society, that it will afford me the highest gratification if by any acts, in my power, I may be able to further the cordial coöperation and extend the beneficial intercourse between the two Societies. "You will be gratified to learn that another Number of the very important labors of Major Rawlinson will be very soon issued, and that the * This has since been published, containing a concise analysis of all the Persian cuneiform inscriptions as yet discovered. untiring efforts of that zealous and successful investigator promise to afford the most valuable assistance in deciphering the important inscriptions lately discovered by Mr. Layard at Nimrud, in the vicinity of ancient Nineveh." From Professor Garcin de Tassy of Paris, giving notice. of his having sent to the Society a copy of his Rudiments of the Hindui;-From Professor Mohl, Secretary-Adjunct of the Asiatic Society of Paris, accompanying copies of two of his Reports to that Society, on the progress of oriental knowledge, and a copy of Fresnel's Researches on the Himyaritic inscriptions;-From Mr. John P. Brown, accompanying a translation by himself from the Turkish, of a narrative of the discovery of the New World, entitled Tarikh Hind Gharby, which has long been a popular book among the Turks; and a list of the books printed at the Sultan's press during the year 1845, with a short notice of the subject of each. Respecting the Tarikh Hind Gharby, Mr. Brown says: "It was quite the first book ever printed at Constantinople by the Turks. I can not learn the name of the author, nor the sources from which he collected his information. I found it when in search of something in Arabic, written here, or in Spain, or Barbary, by Muslims, on the subject of the discovery of the New World. But it was a troublesome period for both the Moors of Spain, and the Turks of Asia Minor: the former were being driven from their country, the latter were busy conquering one; so that it is not surprising that little is found on this subject, in the language of either people. The printed copy of the History of Western Hind says, that it was printed in Constantinople A.H. 1142, (A.D. 1726,) by Ibrahim Effendy, a learned Hungarian renegade. Printing owes its origin in this country to this individual, and to another, named Sayd Effendy, who conceived the idea from what he had seen in France during the reign of Louis XV, to whose court he made a visit with his father, the Turkish ambassador. On his return home, Sayd joined with Ibrahim Effendy in petitioning the Grand Vezir, Ibrahim Pasha, for permission to establish a Press, when the matter was referred to the Shaykh ul-Islam and the 'Ulemà, who granted a fetwà in their favor, to publish works not religious. ** I am informed that the Tarikh Hind Gharby existed in manuscript many years before the introduction of printing, but was taken up and printed on account of its popularity as a curious and amusing book." Speaking of the yearly issues from the press of Constantinople, Mr. Brown says: "I will endeavor for the coming year to be able to tell you more about the more important of the books published; it is not, however, easy to do so, without purchasing them, for the booksellers in the Bazar are forbidden by the Government to dispose of books, at all, on religious subjects, and infidels cannot therefore examine them sufficiently to know much of their contents. I go however to the Press, and purchase such as I wish, and find the Director very liberal and tolerant. I hope the prohibition referred to will ere long be removed, and then infidels may find something of interest in the heaps of manuscripts on the shelves of the booksellers. The present administration is very liberal, and tolerates entire liberty of conscience and inquiry on religious subjects, so that this and other similarly ridiculous prohibitions will doubtless ere long be removed." The Corr. Secretary then read a Paper upon Mr. Brown's translation of Et-Tabary's conquest of Persia by the Arabs. Professor Edwards afterwards gave an interesting account of a meeting of the German Oriental Society, held in Jena, at which he was present. Professor Edwards and Rev. Mr. Treat made remarks on certain supposed discoveries of Rev. J. L. Wilson, missionary on the Gabûn, in Western Africa, tending to establish the fact of an affinity between all the Negro dialects spoken in that part of Africa south of the Mountains of the Moon, and relative to certain peculiarities of the Mpongwe, the dialect of the Gabûn. A letter from the President was read, recommending that the Society hereafter hold only annual meetings, and these in different places from year to year. The Corr. Secretary and Dr. Anderson then presented books for the Library, in the names of the donors. The following persons, recommended by the Directors, were chosen members of the Society, viz.: Rev. Chandler Robbins, of Boston; Rev. J. L. Wilson, missionary in Western Africa; and Rev. Samuel R. Brown, missionary in China. The Chairman mentioned the report of a discovery having been recently made by W. Winthrop Andrews, Esq., American Consul on the island of Malta, of a monument there, supposed to be Phoenician, which has never been described; and the Corr. Secretary was requested to communicate with Mr. Andrews on the subject. The Society then adjourned. Jan. 5. 1848.- A regular Quarterly Meeting of the Society was held this day, at the Rooms of the American Academy in Boston. Professor Felton in the Chair. Letters were read: From Rev. Messrs. Wilson, Brown, and Robbins, acknowledging their election into the Society;From Rev. H. A. Homes, missionary in Turkey;-From Rev. H. G. O. Dwight, missionary in Turkey, accompanying a beautifully written and original Hatti Sherif of the last Sultân, by which an Armenian Patriarch was commissioned. It was presented by Mr. Sarkis, Secretary of the Armenian Protestant Community of Turkey, to Mr. Dwight, and by him to the Society.-From Mr. John P. Brown, announcing the continuation of his translation from Et-Tabary, down to the times of the Khalif 'Aly, and promising to make search for a copy of Et-Tabary's Annals in the original Arabic;-From Rev. W. G. Schauffler, missionary in Turkey-and From the President, accompanying a com munication from Mr. W. Roth, relative to a copy of Dr. Roth's Literature and History of the Vedas, sent by the author for the Society's Library. The Corr. Secretary then submitted the Report of a Committee of the Directors, appointed to consider the expediency of making some special arrangements in the Society, for the promotion of classical learning as auxiliary to oriental research, as follows: THE Committee of the Directors on the propriety of making the cultivation of classical learning, so far as auxiliary to oriental research, a special object in this Association, respectfully report: The Committee consider it unnecessary, and beyond the demand of the present occasion, to attempt any thing like a full exposition of the relations between oriental and classical studies. A volume would not more than suffice for that, and no proficient in either branch of learning needs to be instructed on the subject. Yet it seems proper for us to allude to some of those points on which light has been thrown, by bringing classical knowledge into combination with oriental, as well as to a few of the topics which wait to be illustrated, by means of this union of intellectual forces, carried still farther than heretofore. To begin then with what this has already effected, relative to philology, we may safely say, that the principles of Greek and Latin conjugation and declension, both as to form and signification, have been reduced to a science, as far as they are so, chiefly through the applications which classical scholars have made of Bopp's comparison of the principal members of the Indo-European family of languages with the Sanskrit as their common progenitor; though it may not be true that the particular views of Bopp have been uniformly adopted. Nor could the system of Sanskrit inflection have been drawn out as it is in Bopp's Comparative Grammar, without regard to those phenomena which the classic languages present. So the Greek and Latin radicals have been marked with precision, only as lately dissected out, from derived forms of language, with an eye fixed on the results obtained by the analysis of Sanskrit words. A knowledge of the signification of Sanskrit roots as well as forms, has also not only facilitated the tracing back of the more ordinary expressions of thought in the classic languages to their most ancient known sources, |