If we compare the work of Hervas with a similar work which excited much attention towards the end of the last century, and is even now more widely known than Hervas, I mean Court de Gebelin's "Monde Primitif," 1 we shall see at once how far superior the Spanish Jesuit is to the French philosopher. Gebelin treats Persian, Armenian, Malay, and Coptic as dialects of Hebrew; he speaks of Bask as a dialect of Celtic, and he tries to discover Hebrew, Greek, English, and French words in the idioms of America. Hervas, on the contrary, though embracing in his catalogue five times the number of languages that were known to Gebelin, is most careful not to allow himself to be carried away by theories not warranted by the evidence before him. It is easy now to point out mistakes and inaccuracies in Hervas, but I think that those who have blamed him most are those who ought most to have acknowledged their obligations to him. To have collected specimens and notices of more than 300 languages is no small matter. But Hervas did more. He himself composed grammars of more than forty languages.2 He was the first to point out that the true affinities of languages must be determined chiefly by grammatical evidence, not by mere similarity of words. He proved, by a compara1 Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne: Paris, 1773. 2 Catalogo, i. 63. 3 "Mas se deben consultar gramaticas para conocer su caracter proprio por medio de su artificio gramatical.” — Catalogo, i. 65. The same principle was expressed by Lord Monboddo, about 1795, in his Ancient Metaphysics, vol. iv. p. 326. "My last observation is, that, as the art of a language is less arbitrary and more determined by rule than either the sound or sense of words, it is one of the principal things by which the connection of languages with one another is to be discovered. And, therefore, when we find that two languages practise these great arts of language, tive list of declensions and conjugations, that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Amharic are all but dialects of one original language, and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic. He scouted the idea of deriving all the languages of mankind from Hebrew. He had perceived clear traces of affinity in Hungarian, Lapponian, and Finnish, three dialects now classed as members of the Turanian family.2 He had proved that Bask was not, as was commonly supposed, a Celtic dialect, but an independent language, spoken by the earliest inhabitants of Spain, as proved by the names of the Spanish mountains and rivers.3 Nay, one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of the science of language, the establishment of the Malay and Polynesian family of speech, extending from the island of Madagascar east of Africa, over 208 degrees of longitude, to the Easter Islands west of America, was made by Hervas long before it was announced to the world by Humboldt. derivation, composition, and flexior, in the same way, we may conclude, I think, with great certainty, that the one language is the original of the other, or that they are both dialects of the same language." 1 Catalogo, ii. 468. 2 Ibid. i. 49. Witsen, too, in a letter to Leibniz, dated Mai 22, 1698, alludes to the affinity between the Tataric and Mongolic languages. “On m'a dit que ces deux langues (la langue Moegale et Tartare) sont différentes à peu près comme l'Allemand l'est du Flamand, et qu'il est de même des Kalmucs et Moegals." — Collectanea Etymologica, ii. p. 363. 3 Leibniz held the same opinion (see Hervas, Catalogo, i. 50), though he considered the Celts in Spain as descendants of the Iberians. + Catalogo, i. 30. "Verá que la lengua llamada malaya, la qual se habla en la península de Malaca, es matriz de inumerables dialectos de naciones isleñas, que desde dicha península se extienden por mas de doscientos grados de longitud en los mares oriental y pacífico." Ibid. ii. 10. "De esta península de Malaca han salido enjambres de pobladores de las islas del mar Indiano y Pacífico, en las que, aunque parece haber otra nacion, que es de negros, la malaya es generalmente la mas dominante y extendida. La lengua malaya se habla en dicha península, continente del Asia, en las islas Maldivas, en la de Madagascar (perteneciente Hervas was likewise aware of the great grammatical similarity between Sanskrit and Greek, but the imperfect information which he received from his friend, the Carmelite missionary, Fra Paolino de San Bartolomeo, the author of the first Sanskrit grammar, published at Rome in 1790, prevented him from seeing the full meaning of this grammatical similarity. How near Hervas was to the discovery of the truth may be seen from his comparing such words as theos, God, in Greek, with Deva, God, in Sanskrit. He identified the Greek auxiliary verb eimi, eis, esti, I am, thou art, he is, with the Sanskrit asmi, asi, asti. He even pointed out that the terminations of the three genders1 in Greck, 08, ē, on, are the same as the Sanskrit, as, â, am. But believing, as he did, that the Greeks derived their philosophy and mythology from India," he supposed that they had likewise borrowed from the Hindus some of their words, and even the art of distinguishing the gender of words. The second work which represents the science of language at the beginning of this century, and which is, to a still greater extent, the result of the impulse which Leibniz had given, is the Mithridates of Adelung. Adelung's work depends partly on Hervas, al Africa), en las de Sonda, en las Molucas, en las Filipinas, en las del archipiélago de San Lázaro, y en muchísimas del mar del Sur desde dicho archipiélago hasta islas, que por su poca distancia de América se creian pobladas por americanos. La isla de Madagascar se pone á 60 grados de longitud, y á los 268 se pone la isla de Pasqua ó de Davis, en la que se habla otro dialecto malayo; por lo que la extension de los dialectos malayos es de 208 grados de longitud." 1 Catalogo, ii. 134. 2 Ibid. ii. 135. 8 The first volume appeared in 1806. He died before the second volume was published, which was brought out by Vater in 1809. The third and fourth volumes followed in 1816 and 1817, edited by Vater and the younger Adelung. partly on the collections of words which had been made under the auspices of the Russian government. Now these collections are clearly due to Leibniz. Although Peter the Great had no time or taste for philological studies, the government kept the idea of collecting all the languages of the Russian empire steadily in view.1 Still greater luck was in store for the science of language. Having been patronized by Cæsar at Rome, it found a still more devoted patroness in the great Cesarina of the North, Catherine the Great (1762-1796). Even as Grand-duchess Catherine was engrossed with the idea of a Universal Dictionary, on the plan suggested by Leibniz. She encouraged the chaplain of the British Factory at St. Petersburg, the Rev. Daniel Dumaresq, to undertake the work, and he is said to have published, at her desire, a "Comparative Vocabulary of Eastern Languages," in quarto; a work, however, which, if ever published, is now completely lost. The reputed author died in London in 1805, at the advanced age of eighty-four. When Catherine came to the throne, her plans of conquest hardly absorbed more of her time than her philological studies; and she once shut herself up nearly a year, devoting all her time to the compilation of her Comparative Dictionary. A letter of hers to Zimmermann, dated the 9th of May, 1785, may interest some of my hearers: — "Your letter," she writes, "has drawn me from the solitude in which I had shut myself up for nearly nine months, and from which I found it hard to stir. You 1 Evidence of this is to be found in Strahlenberg's work on the "North and East of Europe and Asia," 1730; with tabula polyglotta, &c.; in Messerschmidt's "Travels in Siberia," from 1729-1739; in Bachmeister," Idea et desideria de colligendis linguarum speciminibus:" Petropoli, 1773; in Güldenstädt's "Travels in the Caucasus," &c. will not guess what I have been about. I will tell you, for such things do not happen every day. I have been making a list of from two to three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and I have had them translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. Their number exceeds already the second hundred. Every day I took one of these words and wrote it out in all the languages which I could collect. This has taught me that the Celtic is like the Ostiakian that what means sky in one language means cloud, fog, vault, in others; that the word God in certain dialects means Good, the Highest, in others, sun or fire. (Up to here her letter is written in French; then follows a line of German.) I became tired of my hobby, after I had read your book on Solitude. (Then again in French.) But as I should have been sorry to throw such a mass of paper in the fire; besides, the room, six fathoms in length, which I use as a boudoir in my hermitage, was pretty well warmed -I asked Professor Pallas to come to me, and after making an honest confession of my sin, we agreed to publish these collections, and thus make them useful to those who like to occupy themselves with the forsaken toys of others. We are only waiting for some more dialects of Eastern Siberia. Whether the world at large will or will not see in this work bright ideas of different kinds, must depend on the disposition of their minds, and does not concern me in the least." If an empress rides a hobby, there are many ready to help her. Not only were all Russian ambassadors instructed to collect materials; not only did German professors supply grammars and dictionaries, but 1 1 The empress wrote to Nicolai at Berlin to ask him to draw up a cata |