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eyes again to the yet unnumbered dialects now spoken by the nomad tribes of Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific, no scholar need be afraid for some generations to come that there will be no language left to him to conquer.

There is another charm peculiar to the Science of Language, or one, at least, which it shares only with its younger sisters, I mean the vigorous contest that is still carried on between great opposing principles. In Astronomy, the fundamental laws of the universe are no longer contested, and the Ptolemæan system is not likely to find new supporters. In Geology, the feuds between the Vulcanists and the Neptunists have come to an end, and no unprejudiced person doubts at the present moment whether an ammonite be a work of nature and a flinthead a work of art. It is different in the Science of Language. There, the controversies about the great problems have not yet subsided. The questions

whether language is a work of nature or a work of art, whether languages had one or many beginnings, whether they can be classified in families or no, are constantly starting up, and scholars, even while engaged in the most minute inquiries, while carrying brick and mortar to build the walls of their new science, must have their sword girded by their side, always ready to meet the enemy. This, no doubt, may sometimes be tedious, but it has one good effect, it leads us to examine carefully the ground on which we take our stand, and keeps us alive, even while analyzing mere prefixes and suffixes, to the grandeur and the sacredness of the issues that depend on these minutiæ. The foundations of our

THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE AS A PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 15

science do not suffer from such attacks; on the contrary, like the coral cells built up quietly and patiently from the bottom of the sea, they become more strongly cemented by these whiffs of spray that are dashed across.

Emboldened by the indulgent reception with which I met in this place, when first claiming some share of public sympathy in behalf of the Science of Language, I venture to-day to come again before you with a course of lectures on the same subject, --"on mere words, on nouns, and verbs, and particles," and I trust you will again, as you did then, make allowance for the inevitable shortcomings of one who has to address you with a foreign accent, and on a subject foreign to the pursuits of many of the supporters of this Institution. One thing I feel more strongly than ever, namely, that, without the Science of Language, the circle of the physical sciences, to which this Institution is more specially dedicated, would be incomplete. The whole natural creation tends towards man: without man, nature would be incomplete and purposeless. The Science of Man, therefore, or, as it is sometimes called, Anthropology, must form the crown of all the natural sciences. And if it is language by which man differs from all other created things, the Science of Language has a right to hold that place which I claimed for it when addressing for the first time the members and supporters of this Institution. Allow me to quote the words of one whose memory becomes more dear and sacred to me with every year, and to whose friendship I owe more than I here could say. Bunsen, when addressing,

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in 1847, the newly formed section of Ethnology, at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, said:

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"If man is the apex of the creation, it seems right, on the one side, that an historical inquiry into his origin and development should never be allowed to sever itself from the general body of natural science, and in particular from physiology. But, on the

other hand, if man is the apex of the creation, if he is the end to which all organic formations tend from the very beginning; if man is at once the mystery and the key of natural science; if that is the only view of natural science worthy of our age, then ethnological philology, once established on principles as clear as the physiological are, is the highest branch of that science for the advancement of which this Association is instituted. It is not an appendix to physiology or to anything else; but its object is, on the contrary, capable of becoming the end and goal of the labors and transactions of a scientific association." 1

In my former course all that I could attempt to do was to point out the principal objects of the Science of Language, to determine its limits, and to lay before you a general map of the ground that had been explored, with more or less success, during the last fifty years. That map was necessarily incomplete. It comprehended not much more than what in an atlas of the ancient world is called "Orbis Veteribus Notus," where you distinguish names and boundaries only in those parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa which formed the primeval stage of the great 1 Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1847, p. 257.

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drama of history; but where beyond the Hyperboreans in the North, the Anthropophagi in the West, and the Ethiopians1 in the South, you see but vaguely shadowed outlines, the New World beyond the Atlantis existing as yet merely as the dream of philosophers.

It was at first my intention, in the present course of lectures, to fill in greater detail the outlines of that map. Materials for this are abundant and steadily increasing. The works of Hervas, Adelung, Klaproth, Balbi, Prichard, and Latham, will show you how much more minutely the map of languages might be colored at present than the ancient geographical maps of Strabo and Ptolemy. But I very soon perceived that this would hardly have been a fit subject for a course of lectures. I could only have given you an account of the work done by others: of explorations made by travellers or missionaries among the black races of Africa, the yellow tribes of Polynesia, and the red-skins of America. should have had simply to copy their descriptions of the manners, customs, laws, and religions of these

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1 The Hyperboreans, known to Homer and Herodotus as a people living in the extreme north, beloved by Apollo, and distinguished for piety and happiness, were to the Greeks a mythical people, like the Uttarakurus of the Brahmans. Their name signifies "living beyond the mountains," aud Boreas too, the north-wind, meant originally the wind from the mountains, and more particularly from the Rhipæan mountains. (See Preller, Griechische Mythologie, i. 157.) Boros, from which Boreas, is another form of ores, mountain, both derived from the same root which in Sanskrit yields giri, mountain, and in ancient Slavonic gora. (See Curtius, Grundzüge der Griechischen Etymologie, i. 314; ii. 67.)

The Ethiopians, equally known to Homer and Herodotus, were originally intended for dark-looking people in general. Aithiops, like althops, meant fiery-looking, from authein, to light up, to burn, Sanskrit idh, to kindle. (See Curtius, L. c. i. 215.)

savage tribes, to make abstracts of their grammars and extracts from their vocabularies. This would necessarily have been work at second-hand, and all I could have added of my own would have been a criticism of their attempts at classifying some of the clusters of languages in those distant regions, to point out similarities which they might have overlooked, or to protest against some of the theories which they had propounded without sufficient evidence. All who have had to examine the accounts of new languages, or families of languages, published by missionaries or travellers, are aware how not only their theories, but their facts, have to be sifted, before they can be allowed to occupy even a temporary place in our handbooks, or before we should feel justified in rectifying accordingly the frontiers on the great map of the languages of mankind. Thus I received but the other day some papers, printed at Honolulu,1 propounding the theory "that all those tongues which we designate as the IndoEuropean languages have their true root and origin in the Polynesian language." "I am certain,” the author writes, "that this is the case as regards the Greek and Sanskrit: I find reason to believe it to be so as to the Latin and other more modern tongues, -in short, as to all European languages, old and young." And he proceeds: "The second discovery which I believe I have made, and with which the former is connected, is that the study of the Polynesian language gives us the key to the original function of language itself, and to its whole mechanism."

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1 The Polynesian, Honolulu, Sept. 27, Oct. 4, Oct. 11, 1862, — containing an Essay by Dr. J. Rae.

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