have been known in the first ages of civility, and have got names; so that it is impossible that one language could have borrowed them from another, unless it was a derivative or dialect of that language. Of this kind are the names of numbers, of the members of the human body, and of relations, such as that of father, mother, and brother. And first, as to numbers, the use of which must have been coeval with civil society. The words in the Shanscrit for the numbers, from one to ten, are, ek, dwee, tree, chatoor, panch, shat, sapt, augt, nava, das, which certainly have an affinity to the Greek or Latin names for those numbers. Then they proceed towards twenty, saying ten and one, ten and two, and so forth, till they come to twenty; for their arithmetic is decimal as well as ours. Twenty they express by the word veensatee. Then they go on till they come to thirty, which they express by the word treensat, of which the word expressing three is part of the composition, as well as it is of the Greek and Latin names for those numbers. And in like manner they go on expressing forty, fifty, &c., by a like composition with the words expressing simple numerals, namely, four, five, &c., till they come to the number one hundred, which they express by sat, a word different from either the Greek or Latin name for that number. But, in this numeration, there is a very remarkable conformity betwixt the word in Shanscrit expressing twenty or twice ten, and the words in Greek and Latin expressing the same number; for in none of the three languages has the word any relation to the number two, which, by multiplying ten, makes twenty; such as the words expressing the numbers thirty, forty, &c., have to the words expressing three or four; for in Greek the word is eikosi, which expresses no relation to the number two; nor does the Latin viginti, but which appears to have more resemblance to the Shanscrit word veensatee. And thus it appears that in the anomalies of the two languages of Greek and Latin, there appears to be some conformity with the Shanscrit.'

Lord Monboddo compares the Sanskrit pada with the Greek pous, podos; the Sanskrit nâsa with the

Latin nasus; the Sanskrit deva, god, with the Greek theos and Latin deus; the Sanskrit ap, water, with the Latin aqua; the Sanskrit vidhavâ with the Latin vidua, widow. Sanskrit words such as gonia for angle, kentra for centre, hora for hour, he points out as clearly of Greek origin, and imported into Sanskrit. He then proceeds to show the grammatical coincidences between Sanskrit and the classical languages. He dwells on compounds such as tripada, from tri, three, and pada, foot—a tripod; he remarks on the extraordinary fact that Sanskrit, like Greek, changes a positive into a negative adjective by the addition of the a privative; and he then produces what he seems to consider as the most valuable present that Mr. Wilkins could have given him, namely, the Sanskrit forms, asmi, I am; asi, thou art; asti, he is; santi, they are; forms clearly of the same origin as the corresponding forms esmi, eis, esti, in Greek, and sunt in Latin.

Dugald Stewart.

Another Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, was much less inclined to yield such ready submission. No doubt it must have required a considerable effort for a man brought up in the belief that Greek and Latin were either aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew, to bring himself to acquiesce in the revolutionary doctrine that the classical languages were intimately related to a jargon of mere savages; for such all the subjects of the Great Mogul were then supposed to be. However, if the facts about Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too wise not

to see that the conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch-forgers and liars, the Brahmans, and that the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition. I mention this fact, because it shows, better than anything else, how violent a shock was given by the discovery of Sanskrit to prejudices most deeply engrained in the mind of every educated man. The most absurd arguments found favour for a time, if they could only furnish a loophole by which to escape from the unpleasant conclusion that Greek and Latin were of the same kith and kin as the language of the black inhabitants of India. The first who, in the broad daylight of European science, dared boldly to face both the facts and the conclusions of Sanskrit scholarship, was the German poet, Frederick Schlegel.

Frederick Schlegel.

He had been in England during the peace of Amiens (1801–1802), and had acquired a smattering of Sanskrit from Mr. Alexander Hamilton. After carrying on his studies for some time in Paris, he published, in 1808, his work on The Language and Wisdom of the Indians. This work became the foundation of the science of language. Though published only two years after the first volume of Adelung's Mithridates, it is separated from that work by the same distance which separates the Copernican from the Ptolemæan system. Schlegel was not a great scholar. Many of

his statements have proved erroneous; and nothing would be easier than to dissect his essay and hold it up to ridicule. But Schlegel was a man of genius; and when a new science is to be created, the imagination of the poet is wanted, even more than the accuracy of the scholar. It surely required somewhat of poetic vision to embrace with one glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany, and to rivet them together by the simple name of Indo-Germanic. This was Schlegel's work; and, in the history of the human intellect, it has been truly called 'the discovery of a new world.'

We shall see how Schlegel's idea was taken up in Germany, and how it led almost immediately to a genealogical classification of the principal languages of mankind.

CHAPTER VII.

GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES.

W

The Founders of Comparative Philology.

E traced in a former chapter the history of the various attempts at a classification of languages to the year 1808, the year in which Frederick Schlegel published his little work on The Language and Wisdom of the Indians. This work was like the wand of a magician. It pointed out the place where a mine should be opened; and it was not long before some of the most distinguished scholars of the day began to sink their shafts and raise the ore. For a time, everybody who wished to learn Sanskrit had to come to England. Bopp, Schlegel, Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, all spent some time in this country, copying manuscripts at the East India House, and receiving assistance from Wilkins, Colebrooke, Wilson, and other distinguished members of the old Indian Civil Service. The first minute and scholar-like comparison of the grammar of Sanskrit with that of Greek, Latin, Persian, and German was made by Francis Bopp, in 1816.1 Other essays of his followed; and in 1833 appeared the first volume of his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, 1 Conjugationssystem, Frankfurt, 1816.