Eleven Discourses Author:William Jones Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY DISCOURSE, ON THE HINDUS, DELIVEEED 2ND. FEBRUARY, 1786. N the former discourses, which I had the honor of addressing to you, Gen... more »tlemen, on the institution and objects of our Society, I confined myself purposely to general topics; giving in the first a distant prospect of the vast career, on which we were entering, and, in the second, exhibiting a more diffuse, but still superficial, sketch of the various discoveries in History, Science, and Art, which we might justly expect from our inquiries into the literature of Asia. I now propose to fill up that outline so comprehensively as to omit nothing essential, yet so concisely as to avoid being tedious ; and, if the state of my health shall suffer me to continue long enough in this climate, it is my design, with your permission, to prepare for our annual meetings a series of short dissertations, unconnected in their titles and subjects, but all tending to a common point of no small importance in the pursuit of interesting truths. Of all the works, which have been published in our own age, or, perhaps, in any other, on the History of the Ancient World, and the first population of this habitable globe, that of Mr. Jacob Bryant, whom I name with reverence aijid affection, has the best claim to the praise of deep erudition ingeniously applied, and new theories happily illustrated by an assemblage of numberless converging rays from a most extensive circumference : it falls, never theless, as every human work must fall, short of perfection ; and the least satisfactory part of it seems to be that, which relates to the derivation of words some Asiatic languages. Etymology has, no doubt, some use in historical researches ; but it is a medium of proof so very fallacious, that, where it elucidates one fact, it...« less