This is the second of two volumes of the magnum opus from pioneer assyriologist and linguist Reverend Archibald Sayce and continues directly from the first, providing an introduction to linguistic roots, inflectional families of speech, agglutinative, incorporating, polysynthetic and isolating languages, comparative mythology, the science of religion, the origin of language and the relation of language to ethnology, logic, and education. In it, Sayce was the first to emphasize the principle of partial assimilation and the linguistic principle of analogy. This fourth edition, ten years after the first, reflected on the limitations of science revealed since 1890, in an era when languages, like other humanities subjects, still idealised scientific approaches.