enclosures, nay under the same roof. There was a time when out of many possible names for father, mother, daughter, son, dog and cow, heaven and earth, those which we find in all the Aryan languages were framed, and obtained a mastery in the struggle for life which is carried on among synonymous words as much as among plants and animals. Look at the comparative table of the auxiliary verb AS, to be, in the different Aryan languages. The selection of the root AS out of many roots, equally applicable to the idea of being, and the joining of this root with one set of personal terminations, all originally personal pronouns, were individual acts, or if you like, historical events. They took place once, at a certain date and in a certain place; and as we find the same forms preserved by all the members of the Aryan family, it follows that before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colonies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectical germs of all; a clan that had advanced to a state of agricultural civilization; that had recognized the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage; and that invoked the Giver of Light and Life in heaven by the same name which you may still hear in the temples of Benares, in the basilicas of Rome, and in our own churches and cathedrals.

After this clan broke up, the ancestors of the Indians and Zoroastrians must have remained together for some time in their migrations or new settlements; and I believe that it was the reform of Zoroaster which produced

at last the split between the worshippers of the Vedic gods and the worshippers of Ormuzd. Whether, besides this division into a southern and northern branch, it is possible by the same test (the community of particular words and forms), to discover the successive periods when the Germans separated from the Slaves, the Celts from the Italians, or the Italians from the Greeks, seems more than doubtful. The attempts made by different scholars have led to different and by no means satisfactory results;1 and it seems best, for the present, to trace each of the northern classes back to its own dialect, and to account for the more special coincidences between such languages as, for instance, the Slavonic and Teutonic, by admitting that the ancestors of these races preserved from the beginning certain dialectical peculiarities which existed before, as well as after, the separation of the Aryan family.

1 See Schleicher, Deutsche Sprache, s. 81.

LECTURE VI.

COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR.

THE genealogical classification of the Aryan languages was founded, as we saw, on a close comparison of the grammatical characteristics of each; and it is the ob ject of such works as Bopp's "Comparative Grammar’ to show that the grammatical articulation of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic, was produced once and for all; and that the apparent differences in the terminations of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, must be explained by laws of phonetic decay, peculiar to each dialect, which modified the original common Aryan type, and changed it into so many national languages. It might seem, therefore, as if the object of comparative grammar was attained as soon as the exact genealogical relationship of languages had been settled; and those who only look to the higher problems of the science of language have not hesitated to declare that "there is no painsworthy difficulty nor dispute about declension, number, case, and gender of nouns." But although it is certainly true that comparative grammar is only a means, and that it has well nigh taught us all that it has to teach, at least in the Aryan family of speech, it is to be hoped that, in the science of language, it will always retain that prominent place which it has obtained through the labors of Bopp,

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Grimm, Pott, Benfey, Curtius, Kuhn, and others. Besides, comparative grammar has more to do than simply to compare. It would be easy enough to place side by side the paradigms of declension and conjugation in San skrit, Greek, Latin, and the other Aryan dialects, and to mark both their coincidences and their differences. But after we have done this, and after we have explained the phonetic laws which cause the primitive Aryan type to assume that national variety which we admire in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, new problems arise of a more interesting nature. We know that grammatical terminations, as they are now called, were originally independent words, and had their own purpose and meaning. Is it possible, after comparative

grammar has established the original forms of the Aryan terminations, to trace them back to independent words, and to discover their original purpose and meaning? You will remember that this was the point from which we started. We wanted to know why the termination d in I loved should change a present into a past act. We saw that before answering this question we had to discover the most original form of this termination by tracing it from English to Gothic, and afterwards, if necessary, from Gothic to Sanskrit. We now return to our original question, namely, What is language that a mere formal change, such as that of I love into I loved, should produce so very material a difference?

Let us clearly see what we mean if we make a distinction between the radical and formal elements of a language; and by formal elements I mean not only the terminations of declension and conjugation, but all derivative elements; all, in fact, that is not radical. Our view on the origin of language must chiefly depend on

the view which we take of these formal, as opposed to the radical, elements of speech. Those who consider that language is a conventional production, base their arguments principally on these formal elements. The inflections of words, they maintain, are the best proof that language was made by mutual agreement. They look upon them as mere letters or syllables without any meaning by themselves; and if they were asked why the mere addition of a d changes I love into I loved, or why the addition of the syllable rai gave to j'aime, I love, the power of a future, j'aimerai, they would answer, that it was so because, at a very early time in the history of the world, certain persons, or families, or clans, agreed that it should be so.

This view was opposed by another which represents language as an organic and almost a living being, and explains its formal elements as produced by a principle of growth inherent in its very nature. "Languages,"1 it is maintained, " are formed by a process, not of crystalline accretion, but of germinal development. Every essential part of language existed as completely (although only implicitly) in the primitive germ, as the petals of a flower exist in the bud before the mingled influences of the sun and the air caused it to unfold.” This view was first propounded by Frederick Schlegel, 1 Farrar, Origin of Languages, p. 35.

2 "It has been common among grammarians to regard those terminational changes as evolved by some unknown process from the body of the noun, as the branches of a tree spring from the stem -or as elements, unmeaning in themselves, but employed arbitrarily or conventionally to modify the meanings of words. This latter view is countenanced by Schlegel. 'Languages with inflexions,' says Schlegel, 'are organic languages, because they include a living principle of development and increase, and alone possess, if I may, so express myself, a fruitful and abundant vegetation. The wonderful mechanism of these languages consists in forming an immense variety of words, and in marking the connection of ideas expressed by