tual and social position of the various nations and the successive ages, its study will reward the student with treasures such as he could expect from few other objects of intellectual pursuit. And, in a certain sense, the study of language has always been natural to man. That is to say, before any curiosity was awakened by things lying so much apart from human interests as herbs, spiders, or snails,-before any science of natural history could arise, there was the practical daily need of knowing how to speak correctly. The language of the infant patriarchs had to be trained into correct Hebrew, just as the nursery-language of our own day is gradually formed into correct English. And the peculiarities of pronunciation of individuals, families, or tribes, must, especially as intercourse amongst men widened, have given rise to discussion as to the right and wrong of dialectic varieties, which directed the attention even of a people ignorant of the existence of grammar to language as a fit subject of speculation. In this early age there was no literature, unless the short proverbs and ballads which might spring up from time to time in each family or tribe in its peculiar dialect, and be as rapidly forgotten, could be dignified by the name; and consequently no authority to determine the classicality of one form or the vulgarity of others, and no evidence of the historical permissibility of one form and the modern innovation of others; and consequently correctness would be determined by analogy thrived would be preferred to throve, brothers to brethren.

But little progress would be made by this primitive speculation on language towards a Science of Language. Inasmuch as the feeling for a correct use of the nominative case rather than the accusative is inherent in human speech of whatever dialect, this question would never present itself for solution at all, and ages would pass during which people would "speak grammar without knowing it."* The same may be said of all the other great cardinal points of grammar; and the kind of languagespeculation that has been indicated would scarcely even tend towards creating grammatical science. The latter owes its being to the philosophers only. When the mind turns its gaze inward upon itself, and discovers that action of some sort or other is always the object of its contemplation, and that action must proceed from some one being and be executed upon some other, then it has not only laid the groundwork of logic, but of gram

* We are aware that there are English dialects which use the pronouns him, her as nominatives; but case-distinctions have so entirely vanished from substantives in our language, that the feeling for them has been obscured, and cannot maintain the correct usage even in the pronouns. But in the dialects of languages in which the distinctions of cases is the rule, and not the exception, no such irregularities are observed.

mar too, by virtue of the correspondence between thoughts and the words that embody them. The difference between verb and substantive, between subject and predicate, between nominative and accusative, is revealed at once. Hence is produced a philosophy, or theory, of language; dealing, however, with syntax, not with grammatical forms, explaining the principles of the collocation of words en masse, but not at all those of the peculiar form of each word singly, and least of all the derivation. of words from some hypothetical root. It is perhaps impossible to overestimate the importance of the advance made at this stage. If it leaves more to be done than it accomplishes itself, it contains the germ of all that is to follow. The differences in nature between the various parts of speech having once been discovered by the philosopher, it will be easy for the grammarian to follow on his track, and discover that they differ in form also. Whereas, if the difference in form had been first noticed, it could have been regarded only as a caprice of speech to be accepted as a fact, but from which no principle could be deduced, and, like other anomalies which the mind finds no pleasure in contemplating, would have been rapidly forgotten again. The categories of time, place, manner, motion to, motion from, having once been established as modes of thought, the grammarian will have a definite direction given to his otherwise desultory studies in tracking out every means adopted by language for the expression of these modes of thought; and thus will be discovered the use of cases and other grammatical mysteries. It is almost needless to observe that for the Western world this great advance was made by Plato and Aristotle; but so apt are we Europeans to deduce the whole of civilisation from Western sources, that it does seem necessary to observe that the Brahmanic philosophers had advanced as far, and indeed much farther, in the direction of philosophical grammar in the sixth century before Christ.

The next stage which the study of language attains is only reached through the experience gained by the comparison of two languages. This stage introduces a study and understanding of the formal part of grammar. It is hardly too much to affirm that but for the contact of the Greeks with other nations, their different conjugations of verbs, declensions of nouns, and derivation of the various parts of speech, would never have been thoroughly understood. As a foreigner reads the idiosyncrasies of our national character better than a native, so it is he who discovers the formal part of the grammar of our language by regarding it from a point outside. We may verify this from our own language. English grammars, which treat the language from a purely English point of view, either simply neglect all

mention of conjugation, or throw out verbs like blow, blew, blown, as irregular and not worth consideration. As their conjugation comes by nature to an Englishman, it does not occur to him that it may depend on principles which would be worth understanding. Accordingly much more may be learned from English grammars for the use of foreigners on the niceties of pronunciation, on peculiarities of conjugation, and on other points of a formal nature, than from most of those written for Englishmen. And so a far more accurate knowledge of the formal elements of the classical languages has undoubtedly been possessed by Scaliger, Casaubon, Porson, Zumpt, Madvig, and Lobeck, than by Demosthenes or Cicero. So different is conscious knowledge from native instinct. Thus the comparison of two languages brings under contemplation a totally different province of language from what would have engaged the student of either separately.

It might be supposed that, as philosophy had given the theoretical principles on which the study of language was to be founded, and as the comparison of two languages for the purpose of teaching one had laid down rules for the formal element, no further advance was possible. And, in truth, the world has been satisfied with this result from Aristotle's day to the present. The rules of form invented by the teacher of language, having regard only to the practical end of enabling us to learn the language, are merely empirical, and indicate no ultimate principle to which the various forms owe their birth; as when they tell us to add d to love if we require the past tense loved, but leave us in the dark as to how that little change of form can produce so great a change of meaning. And so, when these empirical rules separate what ought to be brought together,―as they do in making Corinthi, "at Corinth," to be one case, and Carthagine, "at Carthage," Sardibus, "at Sardes," another; or join what ought to be separated,-as in connecting fero and tuli, summus and supremus,-these misadventures are laid to the account of the "caprice of language," and no attempt is made to arrive at unity or simplicity in what seems to present such a tangle of inconsistencies. When the belief in the "caprice of language" has become a settled one, another stage has been reached in the study of language. A profoundly sad one is this to contemplate: it not only fails itself to advance the science of grammar, but it prevents any future advance; where the earlier age had been delighted with the discovery of law and order, it now finds only chance; every thing that does not display its reason to the most careless glance it brands as irregular. Moreover, if even the inflexion of single words displays so little consistency, how much less likely is the derivation of

one word from another likely to do so! Hence at this stage free play is given to unbounded license of etymology; where scepticism is general as to any principle of formation in languages, etymology may serve as an idle amusement, displaying more or less of ingenuity, but can yield no result, nor even produce conviction in the mind of the etymologist himself. It is, moreover, a sort of ingenuity which, as it rests upon no basis of objective truth, may quite as pleasantly be exercised in the comparison of languages known from the evidence of history and geography to be utterly unconnected, as in that of cognate dialects. When we consider that all our standard dictionaries up to the most recent times, - Forcellini, Freund, Leverett, Damm, Bailey, Johnson, Webster,-whatever be their merits in other respects, stand upon this sceptical and trifling stage in etymology, how can we wonder if etymology has received a bad name, and if an argument based on etymology would be, by nine educated persons out of ten, conceived to rest on shifting sand?

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This prejudice against the etymological comparison of languages rests on so long an experience, and has taken such firm root, that it will probably take a very long time to eradicate it, although the altered method which has produced what we are justified in calling with Dr. Max Müller à Science of Language is not a creation of yesterday. But this we may very safely assert, that no event has yet occurred in this country so calculated to induce a juster view of linguistic studies than the delivery by Dr. Max Müller, before the Royal Institution, of the series of Lectures on the Science of Language which we have put at the head of our Paper. The combination of profound learning on the subject in hand, remarkable dexterity in seizing on the aptest illustrations from every department of the wide field he surveys, a well-stored mind on other subjects of human learning, a masterly intellect trained to sift evidence and trace effects to their causes, and withal an enthusiasm that would carry the reader lightly over the driest flats, and a geniality and sprightliness truly surprising, this combination not only makes Dr. Max Müller a delightful lecturer and writer, but ensures for the science to which he chiefly devotes his great powers an acknowledgment and an interest for which it might have had long to wait. An Englishman, moreover, will willingly allow a foreigner to be an authority on the subject of language in general who has given such practical proof of his linguistic talent by the wonderful facility with which he wields the English tongue. His style is remarkable not only for its pleasant perspicuity, but for its racy English character and its freedom from even any suspicion of foreign idiom.

It was, however, this very etymological comparison of languages, the abuse of which by the empirical and sceptical school had brought etymology into contempt, which gave birth to the new Science of Language. A principle had been established which threw a new light on the subject, and gave a direction to the researches of linguists which led them to ever-expanding discoveries. This was the separation of the two elements of words, root and inflexion, and the discovery consequent thereupon that it is the inflexional system which stamps upon a language its peculiar character, and therefore determines its affinities. To the study of the Semitic dialects we doubtless owe this most fruitful discovery; for in them the identity of the inflexions, and of the whole grammatical system, is far more striking than the affinity of the roots, which, indeed, in many instances diverge very remarkably between the more distant members of the family. And Hervas (in his Catalogo, 1800) "proved, by a comparative 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." Having once convinced himself of this principle on the field of the Semitic languages, he proceeded to apply it with success to other languages; and so we are told "he even pointed out that the terminations of the three genders in Greek os, ē, on, are the same as the Sanskrit as, á, am.

This seems to us the life-giving principle of the modern science of language; and to the collection of vocabularies of all attainable languages of the world, for the purpose of comparison, suggested by Leibniz, and realised in the Vocabulary of the Empress Catherine, and the Mithridates of Adelung, we should assign a very secondary importance. Those vocabularies, indeed, give a most valuable, nay indispensable, store of subject-matter; but the larger the matter to be analysed, the more pressing is the need of a principle to guide the analysis. That Leibniz had discovered the principle which Hervas uses, does not appear; and we therefore, differing from Müller, prefer to regard Hervas as the father of comparative grammar. Yet in the works of Hervas, the Empress Catherine, and Adelung,

"Languages seemed to float about like islands on the ocean of human speech; they did not shoot together to form themselves into larger continents. This is a most critical period in the history of every science, and if it had not been for a happy accident, which, like an electric spark, caused the floating elements to crystallize into regular forms, it is more than doubtful whether the long list of languages and dialects enumerated and described in the works of Hervas and Adelung could long have sustained the interest of the student of languages. This electric spark was the discovery of Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the ancient