rather on grammatical than verbal relationships. He proved that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Amharic, were all dialects of one mother language, the Semitic. He perceived clear traces of affinity between the Hungarian, Lapp, and Finnic dialects; that the Basque was not Celtic, but independent of, and anterior to, the Celtic; and he discovered the vast extent of the Malay and Polynesian family of speech. He discovered the similarity between Greek and Sanscrit, though his imperfect information prevented his seeing the full significance of the discovery. Hervas was followed with still more complete collections by Adelung, in his Mithridates, who drew alike from Hervas and the labors of the Empress Catherine. His first volume was published in 1806; the two last, after his death, by Vater and the younger Adelung, in 1814-15. His arrangement of languages was still defective, being mainly geographical, rather than based on internal affinities.

The study had now reached a point at which it might easily receive an electric and decisive impulse. That impulse was furnished by the Sanscrit, whose full discovery arined scholars with the noblest weapon of Philological Science. Known at an early period, the sacred language of the Brahmans (whose written language is now demonstrably traced back to at least the fifteenth century before Christ) had been a subject of deep curiosity. The first European scholar of Sanscrit. known, was Roberto di Nobili, in 1606. In 1740, Father Pons drew up a comprehensive account of Brahminical literature, and in 1790 published the first European Sanscrit Grammar. Sanscrit philology, however, dates properly from the founding of the Asiatic Society, in 1784. Sir Wm. Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, were among its chief promoters. Sir Wm. Jones (who died in 1790) was the first to discover the extent of the relationship of the Sanscrit to the Greek. No Philologist, he declared, could examine the two without the conviction that they were sprung from a common source, as well as perhaps the Gothic and Celtic.

The discovery wrought like magic, and certainly took the learned world by surprise. It fell like a thunder-bolt into the

magazine of their crude theories and speculations, exploding them in every direction. That among the dark-faced semibarbarians beyond the Indus, there was a language vying in richness and delicacy with the refined and elegant Greek, and fraught with ample literary treasures, overturned almost every cherished notion. Dugald Stuart declared that the language was an imposition -a macaronic invention of some Indian Psalmanazzars. Lord Monboddo woke up from his dream of transformed and man-aping monkeys, to make still some judicious speculations on the new discovery. Its fruits, however, were first, and rapidly reaped on the continent. Frederic Schlegel saw the far-reaching principle of relationship that now united the Indian and Western languages, and with the intuition of genius, riveted them together by the comprehensive name of Indo-Germanic tongues. He was followed by a host of other able men. His brother Augustus William, and William Von Humboldt, both lent their great influence and learning to the promotion of Sanscrit Literature and Comparative Philology. Prof. Bopp followed, with his great work in Comparative Grammar, of which he published the first volume in 1833, and the last in 1852. Pott's Etymological Researches, Grimm's German Grammar, a work of twenty years, followed in the same footsteps. Meantime Rask, a Dane, had visited Persia to study the Zend Language, but died before publishing the results of his researches. His labors were taken up by Eugene Burnouf, whose profound knowledge of Sanscrit and of Comparative Philology enabled him to translate, from the original, the Zend Avesta of Zoroaster. It had been previously translated from a modern Persian version, by Anquetil du Perron.

Into the labors of these men many able scholars have entered, and prosecuted the science with a zeal and success which make it difficult to keep pace with it. The names of Prichard (who showed the Indo-European affinities of the Celtic language), of Garnett, Bunsen, Aufrecht, Schleicher, Diefenbach, Curtius, Max Müller, we can barely mention as among the leading promoters and representatives of this rapidly advancing study.

xxviii.-2.

The fruits of their studies have been equally various and important. First, they have resulted in a genealogical classification of numerous large groups of languages, demonstrating both their affinity, and the nature and degree of their affinity. The principles brought to light in settling the precise relations of the Sanscrit to the other Indo-European tongues, shed a flood of light on the mutual relations of them all. An extended induction showed the same original principles and forms of inflexion running through these languages, and having thus restored the primitive structure from which they all had deviated, it could determine their relations, both to each other and to the original. Thus, in the verb of existence asmi, it was seen that while the Sanscrit asmi and Greek coui are more primitive than the Latin sum, the Greek core and the Latin estis are more primitive than the corresponding Sanscrit 'stha, and again the Latin sunt more primitive than the Gree kevte or eioi. Sunt could never have been derived from ἔντε οι εἰσί; but both sunt and ἔντε could be derived from the Sanscrit asanti. By this process it was discovered that Sanscrit was not the parent, but a sister, perhaps an elder sister, of the Greek and Latin; that the Latin was not the daughter, but the sister, and indeed an elder sister, of the Greek, being, though later in its literary development, yet more archaic in its forms than its classical rival. It was discovered that the Romance languages were not the daughters of the Provençal, as maintained by the able work of Raynouard, but had sprung along with it from the Latin, or rather from those Italian dialects of which the classical language of Rome was the literary expositor.

We have then, as the first result of this wide induction, a very large genealogical classification of languages, based on verbal and grammatical affinities. Geographical lines have disappeared; new laws of union and separation have taken their place. The magnetism of linguistic affinity has drawn together tongues the most widely separated in space, and to a superficial eye, in character; and united in one vast family, with their various subordinate branches, nearly all the cultivated dialects between the Ganges and the Atlantic Ocean.

In and near the Arabian peninsula, we have the before-mentioned Semitic group or family of languages. But now in Asia, the Sanscrit and the Persian, the dialects of Afghanistan, Bokhara, Kurdistan and Armenia, join hands with the widely spread Slavonic family of Eastern Europe, with the Germanic groups in Central, and the Scandinavian groups in Northern Europe, with the Greek and the Latin in the South, with the daughters of the Latin, the Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, Wallachian, and Roumansch, with the English, as essentially Teutonic, and with those Celtic dialects which still retain a lingering, though failing foothold in those narrow coast lands and mountain fastnesses to which mightier tongues and civilizations have driven them.

But while thus linking together vast families of speech by geneological affiliation, and harmonizing the discords of the great Babel of human utterance, Comparative Philology has accomplished still other most important results. It has investigated in the most searching manner, and established on a scientific basis, the laws of phonetic change and of verbal affinity. It has thus re-cast the whole subject of etymology, consigning to the tomb of the Capulets all the crude guesses of earlier time, dissipating at a breath the superficial relationships based on mere accidental resemblances, and bringing up out of the profoundest laws of speech a new set of radical affinities. Feu is not connected with the German feuer, but, through the Italian fuoco, is traced back to the Latin focus. Hon is brought into connexion with the Latin jam: of stands in line with dлó and ab. Zeus stands connected with dies, through the Sanscrit Dyaus, the God of the upper sky. Undoubtedly the ablest Etymologists are also the most modest, and feel that they are liable to be often led astray by false lights; yet Comparative Anatomy does not more completely establish the relationship of widely severed animal structures, than do the far-reaching and rigorous methods of Comparative Philology gradually build up a true Science of Etymology.

This process accomplishes yet more. It reveals the nature of those tense and case endings which were before sup

posed to be purely conventional, and finds them to spring from pronominal or other significant words, which in the decay of language have been worn down so as to have lost nearly all traces of their origin. Following up words to their earliest forms in the tongue to which they belong, and then comparing these with the forms in more nearly or remotely kindred dialects, it arrives at the secret of their origin and composition. Language now becomes all instinct with life: the previously dead form is imbued with vitality, and every element of language, every part of the word, is found to have been originally (what from the nature of speech might have been supposed) the offspring and vehicle of a thought. The d, in I loved, carries us back to the compound form I love did. The Latin amabam and amabo are made by attaching to the radical ama, parts of an old verb of existence which appears in our verb to be. Amavi is made up from ama and fui. 'Epinoa and

khow make their endings, oa and ow, from another verb of existence, sya. The French future, parlerai, is made by attaching to the infinitive, parler, the present of avoir, parler-ai, as, a, &c. The personal inflexion of verbs is made by combining with the root the oblique cases of the personal pronouns, as didw-ju, didw-σr, didw-re, the giving of me, I give, &c.; which have left here and there palpable vestiges in languages from which they have been almost entirely abraded, as in the English word loveth, now changed into loves, and in the French aime-t-il, in which t, instead of being an arbitrary euphonic insertion, is the old termination saved by euphony from ejectment. The endings of the cases are in like manner explained from significant roots. Δήμου is from δημόσιο, an adjective termination, marking the original adjective force of that generic or predicative case mistranslated the genitive. Sermoni (with locative ¿) meant, originally, in speech, as Carthagini has still the locative signification, in Carthage. This induction has been carried so far as fully to warrant the conclusion that all inflexions were originally formed by significant terminations, even where they cannot now be fully made out, and that thus language was originally "vital in every part."