the highest mark, and he is blamed if he lends the authority of his name to opinions which he himself has ceased to hold.

When therefore a new edition of my Lectures became necessary once more, I insisted on the destruction of the old stereotype plates, and I determined to make one more attempt to render these volumes as correct as I could. I found it necessary not only to strike out many things, but likewise to add, and, in some cases, to re-write many pages. I left out what was peculiar to the form of lectures, and in order to keep this new edition more clearly distinct from former editions, I have changed the title from 'Lectures on the Science of Language,' to 'The Science of Language, founded on Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in the years 1861 and 1863.'

I did not attempt, however, to change altogether the original character of my book, and though I should gladly have written a new work on the Science of Language instead of remodelling the old, my age and my many occupations rendered such an idea impossible.

What will, I believe, strike my present and future readers as the most serious defect in this new edition of my Lectures on the Science of Language, is the elaborate character of many arguments in support of theories which are now accepted by almost everybody, but which thirty years ago were novel and startling, and required to be defended against numerous gainsayers. I shall mention a few of them.

The Science of Language as different from Comparative Philology.

The very idea that, by the side of Comparative Grammar, there was room for a Science of Language, treating not only of vowels and consonants and the laws of phonetic change, but of the nature, the origin, and development of human speech, was received very coldly at first. With the exception of Heyse's System der Sprachwissenschaft, 1856, no such attempt had been made before. My own teachers and friends, such as Professors Bopp, Benfey, Curtius and others, looked upon my attempt to establish the general principles of a Science of Language and to connect the discoveries of Comparative Philology with the great problems of philosophy, as at all events premature, while philosophers by profession resented most strongly the intrusion of a new Saul among the old prophets of Logic, Psychology, and Metaphysics.

All this is changed now. Book after book has been published on Language and the Study of Language, on the Life and Growth of Language, on the Origin of Language, on the Principles of Comparative Philology, on the Principles of the History of Language, in which many of the problems first mooted in my Lectures have been most ably and far more fully discussed. The Science of Language, as founded on Comparative Philology, will, I believe, hold its place for ever as an independent science, and some of the most eminent philosophers of the day have given it

the warmest welcome. That it is as essential to the critical philosopher as logic and psychology, is no longer doubted, while some of the more far-seeing thinkers have readily admitted that it will hereafter form the only solid basis of all sound philosophy. It may truly be said therefore that there was no longer any need for pleading so elaborately for the admission of the Science of Language, as a real science, among the most important of academic studies. All I can say is, Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.

And if the title of a Physical Science has been less readily granted to the Science of Language, this is chiefly due to a radical difference of opinion among philosophers, who regard man either as the acme of nature, or as totally unconnected in his mental functions with the rest of the animal world. No one has insisted more strongly than I have on the line of demarcation that separates man and beast, namely language, but no one has been more anxious at all times to render unto nature the things which are of nature, and unto mind the things that are of the mind. No doubt nature may be defined so as to exclude the Science of Language from the narrower circle of the Physical Sciences. With the wider meaning assigned to nature in our days, however, I hold as strongly as ever that the study of human speech may claim not only admission to, but the highest place among the Physical Sciences.

Bow-wow and Pooh-pooh Theories.

Though the problem of the origin of language was expressly excluded from my lectures (it has since been fully treated in my 'Science of Thought '), I had to explain what I considered to be the constituent elements of human speech, namely roots, and not the mere imitations of sounds or interjectional cries. I was told at the time that my repeated argumentations against what I called the Bow-wow and Pooh-pooh theories were only a slaying of the slain, and if that seemed to be so thirty years ago, how much more must it seem to be so at present. And yet I could not entirely suppress those portions of my book. It was a surprise to me when I delivered my lectures that the so-called onomatopoeic theory should in our times still count a few, but very valiant supporters. But though it may be true that that theory in its crudest form is no longer held by anybody, yet, in a slightly modified form it has been broached again and again.

How little the real problem that has to be solved had been understood, was shown once more when my friend, Professor Noiré, now no longer among us, announced what I consider the best, if not the only possible solution of the problem of the origin of roots. He saw clearly that what had to be explained was not the origin of such imitative sounds as cuckoo or bow-wow. Who could ever have been in doubt as to their origin? What had to be explained was the genesis of conceptual sounds, or, if you like,

of sonant concepts. Noiré showed that our first concepts arose by necessity from the consciousness of our own repeated or continuous acts. They could not be our acts, unless we were conscious of them, and our consciousness of them became conceptual as soon as we became conscious of many successive acts as one action. He further showed how these concepts of our own acts might become, so to say, sonant through the clamor concomitans, that is, the sounds which involuntarily accompany the simplest acts of man. If mar, for instance, was one of the many sounds that accompanied the act of rubbing or grinding, then it could serve as the sonant sign of our consciousness of that continuous or repeated act. It would be from the first a conceptual, not a merely perceptual sound.

No doubt, this may be called a mere theory, a mere possibility. Though language might have arisen in that way, it did not follow that it could not have arisen in any other way. But when it became clear to me that what we had obtained as the result of our scientific analysis of language, namely the roots, were exactly what Noiré postulated, sounds expressive of the simplest acts of man, I said both epŋkas and Evρnkа. One of the oldest riddles of the world seemed to me solved, and solved without a residue.

Nothing could be simpler, nothing more convincing, to those who knew what the punctum saliens of our problem really was. But so completely was Noiré's theory, the Synergastic Theory, misunderstood that it was actually taken by some philosophers for a mere