Families Of Language

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

LET us recall for a moment the conclusion of the last chapter, and what was said of the different stages of growth through which a language must pass before it arrives at such a condition as that in which are all the tongues with which most of us are likely to be familiar. We found that there were first two very early stages when what may be called the bones of a language were formed, namely, the acquisition first of the meaning words, those words which standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, as pen, ink, paper; secondly, of the meaningless words, which, like to, for, and, produce no idea in the mind when taken quite alone. And we saw that while the first class of words may have rapidly sprung into existence one after another, the meaningless words could only have gradually come into use, as one by one they fell out of the rank of the meaning class. Again, after this skeleton of language had been got together, there were three other stages, we said, which went to make up the grammar of language. The first, the monosyllabic stage, where any word of the language may be divided into monosyllables, each having a distinct meaning ; the second, the agglutinative stage, where the root, that is to say the part of the word which expresses the essential idea, always remains distinct from the additions that modify it ; and thirdly, the inflexional stage, where the root and the inflexions have got so interwoven as to be no longer distinguishable.

Of course, really to understand what these three conditions are like, the reader would have to be acquainted with some language in each of the three; but it is sufficient if we get clearly into our heads that there are these stages of language-growth, and that, further, each one of all the languages of the world may be said to be in one of the three. Our opportunities of tracing the history of languages being so limited, we have no recorded instance of a language passing out of one stage into another; but when we examine into these states they so clearly wear the appearance of stages that there seems every reason to believe that a monosyllabic language might in time develop into an agglutinative, and again from that stage into an inflexional, language, if nothing stopped its growth.

But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth and development of language? One of these causes is the invention of writing. Language itself is of course spoken language, speech, and as such is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives only in the memory; and thus speech, though it may last for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which among nations that have no writing take the place of books and histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even, but for these centuries lives on in men's memories only. So Homer's ballads . must have passed for several hundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as in the course of a generation or two men may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation, not only are new words being constantly introduced, and others which once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going on in the pronunciation of words. Nay, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different districts; as we know, for instance, that the language of common people does differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties of pronunciation, and what with the use of really peculiar words, the inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants of another. The influence which keeps a language together and tends to make the changes as few as possible is that of writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a sure mark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to-the literary language, and are never used now in common life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. So too the fact that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language.

We see therefore the power which writing has of binding together speech and preventing it from slipping into dialects, of keeping the language rich by preserving words which in common everyday life are apt to be forgotten. But writing may also have a disastrous effect upon an unformed language by checking changes which tend to development, and this is just what has happened in the case of Chinese. We know what a strange people the Chinese are, and how they seemed to have stopped growing just at one particular point, and, with all the machinery, so to speak, ready to make them a great people, how they have remained forever a stunted, undeveloped race, devoid of greatness in any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their language. While this was still in the first of our three stages the monosyllabic the Chinese invented writing, and from that time the language almost ceased to develop, so that it is the best specimen we have of a language in this state. Speaking quite strictly, the ancient Chinese is the only monosyllabic language.

Modern Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan are so nearly monosyllabic that they cannot be considered to have got fairly into the agglutinative stage, and perhaps they never will.

As a matter of fact, then, it is writing which has preserved for us a language in the monosyllabic stage, and perhaps nothing but writing could have prevented such a language from in time becoming agglutinative. Other causes are at work to prevent an agglutinative language becoming inflexional. It is not in this case so easy to say what the hindering causes are: but perhaps, if we look at the difference between the last two classes of language, we get some idea. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions or at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason why we should not use bought in the place of buy, art in the place of am, whom in the place of who no other reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the changes only existed in the form of additions having a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct meaning as additions, or in other words, if we were using an agglutinative language we should be able always to distinguish the addition from the root, and so should understand the precise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an agglutinative language a great deal less of tradition and memory would be required than are wanted to pre-serve an inflected language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected language we must have a much more constant use, and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages. Or we may look at it another way, and say that the cause of the mixing up of the root and its addition came at first from a desire to shorten the word and to save time a desire which was natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse: and we guess from these considerations that the people who use the agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close and active national life. This is exactly the case. If the one or two monosyllabic languages belong to peoples who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural condition is a very unformed one, who are for the most part nomadic races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his immediate neighborhood, using no large public assemblies, which might take the place of literature, in obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Therefore the different dialects and tongues which belong to the agglutinative class are almost endless; and it is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious languages may be grouped, and the geographical position of those who speak them. These include all those peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or Mongol class, and of whom so many different branches the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to Europe; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia and Hindustan; and lastly, the Osmanlees, or Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire are the most distinguished (and most infamous) in history. Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Ural mountains to the far east. Another great class, corresponding to these, the Finnish, once spread across the whole of what is now European Russia and North Scandinavia, but has been gradually driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, though individual nations have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellation Tura, which means" the swiftness of a horse," from their constantly moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of generally as Turanian tongues.

And now we come to the last the most important body of languages the inflexional, and we see that for it have been left all the more important nations and languages of the world. Almost all the " historic " people, living or dead, almost all the more civilized among nations, come under this our last division: the ancient Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern Hindus and the native Persians, and almost all the inhabitants of Europe, with the countless colonies which these last have spread over the surface of the globe. Inflexional languages are separated into two main divisions or families, inside each of which the languages are held by a tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family when they recognize their descent from a common ancestor, so languages belong to one family when they can show ,clear signs that they have grown out of one parent tongue. We may be sure that we are all the children of the first pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages must have grown and changed out of the first speech. But the traces of parentage and relationship are in both cases buried in oblivion; it is only when we come much farther down in the history of the world that we can really see the marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations, separated by thousands of miles, different in color, in habits, in civilization, and quite unconscious of any common fatherhood.

Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected. Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an unskilled eye can discover it. When we see, for instance, such likenesses as exist in English and German between the very commonest words of life kann and can, soll and shall, muss and must, ist and is, gut and good, hart and hard, mann and man, far and for, together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, substantives, prepositions, &c., which differ but slightly one from another we may feel sure either that the English once spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land. As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English and German, at once set about making a long list of words which are common to the two languages; and it would not be a bad amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a corresponding one in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact which was insisted on in the last chapter, that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that changes of vowel are comparatively unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in the other language.

For instance, we soon begin to notice that "T" in German is often represented by "D " in English, as tag becomes day; tochter, daughter; breit, broad; traum, dream; reiten, ride; but sometimes by "TH" in English, as vater becomes father; mutter, mother. Again, "D" in German is often equal to "TH" in English, as dorf, thorpe; feder, feather; dreschen, thrash; drangen, throng; das, that. Now there is a certain likeness common to these three sounds, "T," "D," and "TU," as any one's ear will tell him if he say te, de, the. As a matter of fact they are all pronounced with the tongue pressed against the teeth, only in rather different places; and in the case of the last sound, the,' with a breath or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same time. So we see that, these letters being really so much alike in sound, there is nothing at all extra-ordinary in one sound becoming exchanged for another in the two languages. We learn, therefore, to look beyond the mere appearance of the word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds against each other, and to detect likenesses which might perhaps otherwise have escaped us. For instance, if we see that "CH" in German is often represented by "GH" in English in such words as tochter, daughter; knecht, knight ;2 möchte, might; lachen, laugh, we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly durch corresponds to our "through," the position of the vowels being a matter of comparatively small account. So our power of comparison continually increases, though some knowledge of several languages is necessary before we can establish satisfactory rules or proceed with at all sure steps.

When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect the same word under various disguises. The interest is very great sometimes, for instance, in the case of proper names. The smaller family or, as we have used the word family to express a large class of languages, let us say the branch to which English and German belong is called the Teutonic branch. To it belonged nearly all those barbarian nations who, towards the fall of the Roman empire, began the invasion of her territories, and ended by carving out of them most of the various states and kingdoms of modern Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of these peoples, the best proof that they were connected by language with each other and with the modern Teutonic nations, is to be found in their proper names. We have, for instance, among the Vandals such names as Hilderic, Genseric, and the like ; we compare them at once with Theodoric and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. Then as the Gothic language has been preserved we recognize the termination rik or rïks in Gothic, meaning a "king," and connected with the German reich, and also with the Latin rex Alaric becomes al-rik, " all-king," universal king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic thiudarik, " king of the people." Again, this Gothic word thiuda is really the same as the German deutsch, or as "Dutch," of which also " Teutonic " is only a Latinized form. In the same way the Hilda-rik in Gothic is " king of battles "; and having got this word from the Vandals we have not much difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This change teaches us to turn " CH " of Frankish names into "H," so that instead of Chlovis we first get Hlovis, which is only a softened form of Hludvig, or Hludwig, the modern Ludwig, our Louis. Hlud is known to have meant "famous"' and wig a "warrior," so that Ludwig means famous warrior. The same verb " wig" seems to appear in the word Merovingian, a latinized form of Meer-wig, which would mean sea-warrior.

These instances show us the kind of results we obtain by a comparison of languages. In the case of these names, for instance, we have got enough to show a very close relation-ship amongst the Vandals, the Goths, and the Franks, and had we time many more instances might have been chosen to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been con-fining ourselves to one small branch of a large family. The road, the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties and dangers of mistake, and the student can do little unless he is guided by fixed rules, which we should have to follow, sup-posing we were able to carry on our inquiries into many and distant languages. Those words which we have instanced as being common to us and to German, we have both got by inheritance from an earlier language. Yet there are in English hundreds of words which are not acquired by inheritance from other languages, but merely by adoption ; hundreds of words have been taken directly from the Latin, or from the Latin through the French, or from the Greek, and not de-rived from any early language which was the parent of the Latin, Greek, and English. How shall we distinguish between these classes of words ? In the first place, the simpler words are almost sure to be inherited, because people, in how-ever rude a state they were, could never have done without words to express such everyday ideas as to have, to be, to laugh, to make, to kill—I, thou, to, for, and; whereas they might have done well enough without words such as government, literature, sensation, expression, words which express either things which were quite out of the way of these primitive people, or commonish ideas in a somewhat grand and abstract form. Our first rule, therefore, must be to choose the commoner class of words, or generally speaking, those words which are pretty sure never to have fallen out of use, and which there-fore must have been handed down from father to son.

There is another rule that those languages must be classed together which have like grammatical forms. This is the rule of especial importance in distinguishing a complete family of languages. For when once a language has got into the inflected stage, though it may hereafter lose or greatly modify nearly all its inflections, it never either sinks back into the agglutinative stage, or adopts the grammatical forms of another language which is also in the inflected condition. These are the general rules, therefore, upon which we go. We look first for the grammatical forms and then for the simple roots, and according to the resemblance or want of resemblance between them we decide whether two tongues have any relationship, and whether that relationship is near or distant.

Now it has in this way been found out that all inflected languages belong to one of two families called the Semitic and the Aryan. Let us begin with the Semitic. This word, which is only a Latinized way of saying Shemite, is given to the nations who are supposed to be descended from Shem, the second son of Noah. The nations who have spoken languages belonging to this Semitic family have been those who appear so much in Old Testament history, and who played a mighty part in the world while our own ancestors were still wandering tribes, and at an age when darkness still obscured the doings of the Greeks and Romans. Foremost among all in point of age and fame stand the Egyptians, the earliest of whose recorded kings, Menes, is believed to date back as far as 5000 B.C. Next in antiquity come the Chaldaeans, who have left behind them great monuments in the ancient cities Erech and Ur, and their successors the Assyrians and Babylonians. Abraham himself, we know, was a Chaldaean, and from him descended the Hebrew nation, who were destined to shed the highest honor on the Semitic race. Yet, so great may be the degeneration of some races, and the rise of others, so great may be the divisions which thus spring up between peoples who were once akin, it is also true that all those people, whom the Children of Israel were specially commanded to fight against and even to exterminate the Canaanites, the Moabites, and the Edomites were likewise of Semitic family. The Phoenicians are another race from the same stock who have made their mark in the world. We know how, coming first from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they led the way in the art of navigation, sent colonies to various parts of the world, and foremost among these founded Carthage, the rival and almost the destroyer of Rome. Our list of celebrated Semitic races must close with the Arabs, the founders of Mohammedanism, the conquerors at whose name all Europe used to tremble, whose kingdoms once extended in an unbroken line from Spain to the banks of the Indus.

Such a list gives no mean place to the Semitic family of nations; but those of the Aryan stock are perhaps even more conspicuous. This family (which is sometimes called Japhetic, or descendants of Japhet) includes the Hindus and Persians among Asiatic nations, and almost all the peoples of Europe. It may seem strange that we English should be related not only to the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians, but to the Russians, French, Spanish, Romans, and Greeks as well ; stranger still that we can claim kinship with such distant peoples as the Persians and Hindus. Yet such is the case, and the way in which all these different nations once formed a single people, speaking one language, and their subsequent dispersion over the different parts of the world in which we now find them, affords one of the most interesting inquiries within the range of pre-historic study. What seems actually to have been the case is this : In distant ages, somewhere about the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the north of that mountainous range called the Hindoo-Koosh, dwelt the ancestors of all the nations we have enumerated, forming at this time a single and united people, simple and primitive in their way of life, but yet having enough of a common national life to preserve a common language. They .called themselves Aryas or Aryans, a word which, in its very earliest sense, seems to have meant those who move upwards, or straight; and hence, probably, came to stand for the noble race as compared with other races on whom, of course, they would look down.

How long these Aryans had lived united in this their early home it is, of course, impossible to say; but as the tribes and families increased in numbers, a separation would naturally take place. Large associations of clans would move into more distant districts, the connection between the various bodies which made up the nation would be less close, their dialects would begin to vary, and thus the seeds of new nations and languages would be sown. The beginning of such a separation was a distinction which arose between a part of the Aryan nation, who stayed at the foot of the Hindoo-Koosh and mountains, and in all the fertile valleys which lie there, and another part which advanced farther into the plain. This latter received the name Yavanas, which seems to have meant the protectors, and was probably given to them because they stood as a sort of foreguard between the Aryans, who still dwelt under the shadow of the mountains, and the foreign nations of the plains. And now, their area being enlarged, they began to get still more separated from each other; while at the same time, as their numbers increased, the space wherein they dwelt became too small for them who had out of one formed many different peoples. Then began a series of migrations, in which the collection of tribes who spoke one language and formed one people started off to seek their fortune in new lands, and thus for ever broke off association with their kindred and their old Aryan home. One by one the different nations among the Yavanas (the protectors) were infected with this new spirit of adventure, and though they took different routes, they all travelled westward, and arrived in Europe at last.

A not improbable reason has been suggested for these migrations. It is known that, in spite of the immense volume of water which the Volga is daily pouring into it, the Caspian Sea is gradually drying up, and it has been conjectured as highly probable that hundreds of years ago the Caspian was not only joined to the Sea of Aral, but extended over a large district which is now sandy desert.' The slow shrinking in its bed of this sea would, by decreasing the rainfall, turn what was once a fertile country into a desert; and if we suppose this result taking place while the Aryan nations were gradually increasing in numbers, the effect would be to drive them, in despair of finding subsistence in the ever-narrowing fertile tract between the desert and the mountains, to seek for new homes elsewhere. This, at any rate, is what they did. First among them, in all probability, started the Kelts or Celts, who, travelling perhaps to the south of the Caspian and the north of the Black Sea, found their way to Europe, and spread far on to the extreme west. At one time it is most likely that the greater part of Europe was inhabited by Kelts, who either exterminated or partly mingled with the stone-age men whom they found there. As far as we know of their actual extension in historic times, however, we find this Keltic family living in the north of Italy, in Switzerland, over all the continent of Europe west of the Rhine, and in the British Isles. For the Gauls, who then inhabited the northern part of continental Europe west of the Rhine, the ancient Britons, and probably the Iberians, the ancient inhabitants of Spain, belonged to this family. The Highland Scotch, who belong to the old blood, call themselves Gaels, and their language Gaelic, which is moreover so like the old Irish language that a Highlander could make himself understood in Ireland; perhaps he might do so in Wales, where the inhabitants are likewise Kelts. This word Gael is practically the same as Gaul. In the earliest times of the Roman republic the Gauls, as we know, inhabited all the north of Italy, and used often to make successful incursions down the very centre of the peninsula. Beyond the Alps they extended right up into Belgium, which formed part of ancient Gaul. So much for the Kelts.

Another of the great families who left the Aryan home was the Pelasgic, or the Graeco-Italic. These, journeying along first southwards and then to the west, passed through Asia Minor, on to the countries of Greece and Italy, and in time separated into those two great peoples, the Greeks (or Hellenes, as they came to call themselves) and the Romans. How little did these rival nations deem that they had once been brothers and travelled together in search of new homes! All recollection of these early journeyings were lost to the Greeks and Romans, who, when we find them in historic times, had invented quite different stories to account for their origin.

Next we come to two other great families of nations who seem to have taken the same route at first, and perhaps began their travels together as the Greeks and Romans did. These are the Teutons and the Slaves. They seem to have travelled by the north of the Caspian and Black Sea, extending over all the south of Russia, and down to the borders of Greece; then gradually to have pushed on to Europe, ousting the Kelts from the eastern portion, until we find them in the historical period threatening the borders of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube. Probably the Teutons pushed on most to the west, and left the Slaves behind. For of the nations who from the beginning of the fifth century of our era began the final invasion and dismemberment of the Roman empire, the majority seem to have been Teuton. We have already said what are the nations which compose the Teutonic, or be it, for the words are the same, the Deutsch, or Dutch family. They are the Scandinavians that is to say, the inhabitants of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the English, the Dutch and Flemings (most of the old Keltic inhabitants of Belgium had been driven out subsequently by Teutonic invaders), and the Germans. Lastly, we come to the Slavonians (Slaves), about whom we have been hearing a good deal in the papers lately. This name has no etymological connection, as is sometimes ignorantly said, with our word slave, which has dropped out a c between the s and the l. The word Slave comes from slowan, which in old Slavonian meant to speak, and was given by the Slavonians to themselves as the people who could speak, in opposition to other nations whom, as they were not able to understand them, they were pleased to consider as dumb. The Greek word barbaroi (whence our " barbarians ") arose, in obedience to a like prejudice, only from an imitation of babbling such as is made by saying " bar-bar-bar." The Slavons probably never got farther westward than Bohemia and the north-east of Germany : the greater part of modern Prussia was inhabited by Slaves till about the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. But they spread northward, driving before them the Turanian Lapps and Fins, and southward over all those Turkish provinces about which there is now so much dispute, and again westward into Poland and Bohemia. At the present day the inhabitants of Russia, Poland, Livonia, Lithuania, Bohemia, and most of the South Danubian provinces speak different dialects of the Slavonian tongue.

After he has thus classed the different families of nations, another mine of almost infinite wealth is open to the researches of the philologist a mine too which has at present been only broached. He soon learns the laws governing the changes of sound from one tongue into another. We have noticed some of these experimental laws in the simple relationships as between English and German, where " tag " becomes " day," " dorf " " thorpe," and the like; and all relationships of language are answerable to similar rules. There are laws for the change of sound from Sanskrit into the primitive forms of Greek, Latin, German, English, &c., just as there are laws of change between the first two or the last two.1 So we soon learn to recognize a word in one language which reappears in altered guise in another. And it may be well guessed how valuable such knowledge may be made. If the word signify some common object, a weapon, a tool, an animal, a house, it is not over-likely that it will have changed from the time when it was first employed : the words of present employment, we know, have little tendency to change. So that the time when this word was first used is in all probability the time when the thing was first known to primitive man; and if the word is common to the whole Aryan family, or if it is peculiar to a portion only, then the thing was known or unknown before the separation of the Aryan folk. It might well have happened that when the migrations began our ancestors were still like the stone-age men of the shell-mounds, still in the hunter condition; that they knew nothing of domesticated animals, or of pastures and husbandmen: or it might be again that they had left the pastoral state long behind, and that all their ideas associated themselves with agriculture, with the division of the land, and with the recurring seasons for planting. But language shows us that they had at most only begun some attempts at cultivation, as a supplement to their natural means of livelihood, their flocks and herds: for among the words common to the whole Aryan race there are scarcely any connected with farming, whereas they are redolent of the herd, the cattle-fold, the herdsman, the milking-time. Even the word daughter, which corresponds to the Greek thugatêr and the Sanskrit duhitar, means in the last language " the milker," and that seems to throw back the practice of milking to a vastly remote antiquity.'

On the other hand, the various Indo-European branches have different names for the plough, one name for the German races, another for the Graeco-Italic, and for the Sanskrit. And though aratrum has a clear connection with a Sanskrit root ar, it is not absolutely certain that it ever had in this language the sense of ploughing, and not merely of wounding, whence came the expression for ploughing as of wounding the earth.

Or say we wish to form some notion of the social life of the Aryans. Had they extended ideas of tribal government ? Had they kings, or were they held together only by the units of family life ? Our answer would come from an examination of their common word for "king." If they have no common word, then we may guess that the title and office of kingship arose among the separate Aryan people and received a name from each. Or is it that their common word for king had first some simpler signification, " father," perhaps, showing that among the Aryan folk the social bond was still confined within the real or imaginary boundary of the family ? But in fact we do find a common word for king in several of the languages which has no subsidiary meaning less than that of directing, or keeping straight. This is the Latin rex, the Gothic riles, Sanskrit rig, &c., and its earliest ascertainable meaning was " the director." The Aryans then, even in those days, acknowledged as supreme1 some director chosen (probably) from out of the tribe, a chief to lead their common war-like or migratory expeditions.

These are but illustrations of the method upon which all conclusions touching these our ancestors are founded, and the manner of our knowledge concerning them; far better obtained than merely by gazing upon the instruments which have fallen from their hands, or the monuments they might have raised to commemorate the dead. It is in fact just the difference between Shakespeare's state in Westminster Abbey and that "livelong monument " where of Milton spoke. By perfecting beyond the power of any other race the wonderfully complex faculty of speech the Aryans secured that their memory should be handed on the more certainly, and with far greater completeness, than by records left palpable to men's eyes and hands. Many of their secret thoughts might be unlocked by the same key. Already the same means are being used to give us glimpses of their religious ideas. For the names of the common Aryan gods can be arrived at by just the same comparative method: it may well happen that a name which is only a proper name in one language, can in another be traced to a root which unravels its original meaning. It is as with the word daughter. Here the Sanskrit root seems to unravel the hidden the lost, and so hidden meaning in the Greek or English words. So with a god, the meaning, hidden in the name from those who used it in prayer or praise, becomes revealed to us by the divining rod of our science.

And it is true, nevertheless, that the mine of wealth thus opened has as yet been but cursorily explored.' There are far more and greater fish in this sea than ever came out of it. A strictly scientific method might be found for classifying and tracing the changes which words undergo. Sometimes a word is found greatly modified; sometimes it survives almost intact between the different tongues. There must be some reason for this.

The question might be answered by means of an elaborate classification under the head of the alterations which words have experienced,' and such a comparative vocabulary would lead to the solution of infinite questions concerning the growth of nations. We should be able to look almost into the minds of people long ago, better than we can examine the minds of contemporary races in a lower mental condition, and see what ideas took a strong hold upon them, what things they treated as realities, what metaphorically, and how large for them was the empire of imagination. Then there is the boundless region of proper names, both those of persons and geographical names. These last in every country bear a certain witness to the races who have passed through that country, and show roughly at least the order of their appearance there. The older geographical names are those of natural features, rivers, mountains, lakes, which have been never absent from the scene; the newer names are given to the works of man. In our own country it is so. The names of our rivers (Thames, Ouse, Severn, Wye) are Keltic, i.e. British; those of our towns are Teutonic, Saxon, or Norse. Some few Roman names linger on, as in the name and termination " Chester"; but this, as meaning a place of strength, shows us clearly the reason of its survival. Every European country has changed hands, as ours has done; nay, every country in the world.' So here again we have promise of plenty of work for the philologist in compiling a " Glossary of Proper Names" with etymologies.

Lastly, let it not be forgotten that a great part of all that has been done for the Aryan can be done likewise for the Semitic languages a field scarcely yet turned by the plough; and the reader will confess the debt the world is likely some day to owe to Comparative Philology.