This, however, is but a minor matter. Language is a Science, and in some very vital features of it, certainly a natural Science. If it is objected to its being so classed, that language changes, while the types of nature are unchangeable — the cell of the bee, the web of the spider, the dam of the beaver remaining in all times essentially unmodified-Prof. Müller admits, nay, maintains, that language does indeed fluctuate with extraordinary rapidity, but always independently of human volition, and on principles of natural growth and decay. A difference is clearly to be made between historical change and natural growth, and it is within the latter sphere that the majority of the fluctuations of language take place. Man may indirectly influence these fluctuations by selecting particular dialects and subjecting them to the artificial restraints of a written literature; but beyond this, he can exercise little control over the free life and boundless varieties of language, and even within these restraints these movements go on without his bidding. The history of all nomadic and barbarous tongues is a history of perpetual and rapid fluctuations: the history of literary languages is a history of inevitable decay and reproduction. The two great laws which, according to Prof. Müller, control these changes, are two, that of phonetic decay, and of dialectical regeneration.

Language is at first in all its parts distinctly significant: the force of root and termination is in every word clearly perceived and felt. But there is a constant tendency in speech to wear away one or both of these elements, and so to blend their fragments that the force of the separate constituents is wholly lost sight of, and the word makes, as a whole, its collective and merely conventional impression, quite independently of the meaning of its original component parts. The Chinese is nearly the only remaining language which retains the vitality originally inhering in every part of the word, and even in this the traces of phonetic decay are discoverable. But in all literary languages, this principle is acting with such power as wholly to disfigure the original forms of words. We can scarcely, indeed, open our eyes without discovering its operation. It has reduced the Greek dáxpvov and the Latin

lachryma to the French larme; the Latin semetipsissimum to the French méme; the latin oculus to the French oeil and the English eye; the Gothic tvai tigyus (two decades), to the English twenty. It has cut down the Latin viginta to the French vingt, and has made viginta itself a seemingly unsignificant form, out of the original elements of two and ten. Who in èñíσzoños, meaning distinctly over-seer, would dream of finding the purely arbitrary evêque and bishop; in kyriake, the Lord's house, would find the unmeaning church; or would trace the clipt and crippled forms, j'ai, tu as, il a, to the fuller inflexions, ego habeo, tu habes, ille habet-while, again, even these comparatively nobler forms are but mutilated remains of demonstrably more complete and significant inflexions? The French bonnement is the Latin bona mente, with good mind; fortement, is forti mente; and when a Frenchman says, "J'insisterai fortement," he is giving the transformed substitutes for what was once " Ego insistere habeo forti mente”I have to insist with a firm mind. Such is the universality, such the virulence of this law of phonetic decay. It often eats away the entire substance and body of a word, and leaves nothing but some miserable fragment, what was originally a mere termination, to express its entire idea. Thus age, English age, is the mere ending of a word derived from the Latin atas' avitas, without any relic of the radical. The Sanscrit svasari (sister), appears in Pehlvi and Ossetian as cho, and the Sanscrit duhitar (daughter), has dwindled down in Bohemian to dei.

But while all inflexional languages are thus experiencing the power of phonetic decay, they are acted on by another principle not less powerful, viz: that of dialectical regeneration. Human language at first springs forth in spontaneous and even rank luxuriance, and has a constant tendency to throw out new forms, and develop itself in new dialects. It is a common idea that language begins poor, barren, restricted, and gradually enlarges and enriches itself, until it grows into the fulness and power of a cultivated tongue. Precisely the reverse is the fact. A literary language is one which has been accidentally taken out from the midst of the dialects

which surround it, and passing under the restrictions of writing and grammar, is in fact crippled and impoverished, loses its boundless freedom of creation and change, and hence tends inevitably to decay. Thus literary languages are those whose growth has in fact been arrested, on whose free movement and expansion have been placed the bit and curb of writing, and which have passed into an artificial and a necessarily degenerating state.

Of course it is only relatively, and under its more strictly physical aspects, that a written and literary language can thus be branded as inferior. In breadth, in depth, in glow of coloring and substantial power, we suppose a language that has accompanied, assisted, and recorded the intellectual progress and achievements of a nation, is just as much superior to the rude dialect out of which it has grown, or the rude dialects by which it is still surrounded, as the people whose intellectual life it sustains and signalizes are superior to a rude and semi-barbarous tribe. What is meant to be affirmed is, that the language which has subjected itself to the restraints of literature, has lost that freedom of movement, that fulness of forms, that power of rapid change and reproduction, which marks the language that is only spoken into the air and disappears forever. For language is naturally oral. Its proper office is the mere communication of our ideas. It is a thing of tongue, and lips, and ear. Written language is an after-thought—an accident, belonging not to the original conception of language, but in fact fettering and reducing it to an artificial existence. It will be seen at once what a change passes over language, when from being the evanescent expression, it becomes the permanent guardian of thought. Both meanings and forms of words, which were before originated and thrown away with prodigal profusion, are now watched over and retained with jealous care, lest the very end of written language should be defeated, and that which is recorded for the benefit of posterity, should in a few generations become unintelligible.

But to return; such is the relation of a literary to unwritten language. It is a single rivulet severed from the great tidal

flow of unwritten speech; but that great stream flows on, under and around it, with scarcely diminished fulness and power, and ready at any time to feed and replenish the failing fountains of the literary dialect. We said scarcely diminished. Undoubtedly the presence of cultivated and literary languages does have a tendency to check the freedom of dialectical growth, within the sphere of their influence. To Europe, therefore, with its numerous cultivated languages, we do not look for the fullest exhibitions of this wealth of dialectical formations. Still, France has not less than fifteen distinctly marked dialects: the modern Greek has perhaps nearly seventy. England is full of "local patois which have many forms more primitive than the language of Shakspeare, and in the richness of their vocabulary often surpassing that of the classical writers of any period." The Frisian, on the northwestern coast of Germany is broken up into an endless number of dialects, so that the inhabitants of small and closely contiguous islands are almost wholly unintelligible to each other. But to see the boundless luxuriance and versatility of language, the rapid multiplication of dialects, we must pass to regions and tribes among which it has been unchecked by any literary culture. Among the African and American tribes, two or three, sometimes even a single generation, will completely change a people's speech, and hamlets separated by a stream or mountain become dialectically strangers to each other.

And in these dialects, so often regarded with contempt by the pedant of literature, as the mere corruptions of his culti vated speech, lies the real vitality and restorative power of language. This everlasting undergrowth poured forth from the fertile soil of language, makes good the losses from decay in the noble forest of speech. Unobserved and despised perhaps, and overlaid by the dominant literary tongue, these dialects still live, infusing into it a sort of secret life, and destined, by and by, when some great political convulsion shall have broken down and swept it away, to emerge into the consistency and dignity of national tongues. Thus the Italian, and its kindred Romance languages, were not the product of the Latin language undergoing a violent death, and

in its death-throes giving a mysterious birth to these, its offspring. They sprang from the various modified dialects of Italy, which lived alongside of the Latin, and they did not need to wait for its death before they were in possession of a vigorous infantile life. "The Latin was a living language long after the Italian had learned to run alone."

But while language has thus its natural and inevitable growth; while it passes through processes of decay and renovation which no human will can control; while, in other words, language is not a historical science, still it is undeniably, in many respects, a child of history. Not only is every internal advancement, but also every outward change, every political commotion of a people, mirrored in its language. The waves of invasion and conquest breaking over a people, leave as distinctly their deposits in its speech, as does the ebbing river its deposits on the soil which it has overflowed. In the French language we can discern the several Celtic, Latin, and Germanic elements, corresponding to the great epochs of its political history. In the English the Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman, and, finally, classically Latin elements, would enable the linguistic inquirer, even if its historical records were swept away, to reconstruct, substantially, the grand outline of its history. But though languages may thus be of very diverse origin, we have, properly speaking, no mixed languages. For the determining principle of language is not lexicography, but grammar; and hence no matter how various the origin of its words, from how many different sources they flock in, yet this mere fact does not constitute a mixed language. And however facile may be the dictionary, the grammar is inexorable; she plants herself at the threshold of the language, receives each new comer, compels him to take out papers of naturalization, and swear fealty to the presiding type and genius of the language to which he seeks admission. The immigrants are welcome to bring with them all their internal wealth; but every shred of their foreign costume, every tint and hue of their native grammar, they are compelled to surrender. The are laid upon a bed of Procrustes, and required to stretch or shorten themselves according to its demands. Such is the doctrine