But there are still greater miracles in English such as we find it spoken at the present day, if only we had eyes to see and ears to hear them. English is said to consist of 250,000 words, and most of these words are capable of ever so many changes which we call declension, conjugation, degrees of comparison, composition, and all the rest. That is to say, there is ready made for every one of us an instrument with at least several millions of keys on which we play, as if it were a pianoforte with ninety-six keys.

When uncivilised people hear an organ for the first time, they generally feel a curiosity to open it, to see how it acts, and what it is made of. But this gigantic organ which we call our language, we never try to open, we never ask how it was made or who made it. No, we take it for granted or given, and we think we may thump and hammer on it to our heart's content, trusting that it will always remain in tune.

Veda, οἶδα.

But though the relationship between the languages of India, Persia, Armenia, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic has now become part and parcel of the general stock of knowledge, it is seldom realised how close that relationship really is. It is known that the roots of all these languages are the same, that their grammatical articulation is the same, that a number of important words, such as the numerals, names for father, mother, sky, sun and moon, horse and cow, are the same. But it was only a study of Sanskrit, and of the most ancient, the Vedic Sanskrit, which enabled scholars to discover that

so mysterious a change as that which we observe, for instance, in the vowels of to wit, to know, and I wot, I know, or in German in Ich weiss, I know, and Wir wissen, we know, has its first cause in a change of accent which took place in the most ancient Sanskrit. We must remember that the accent exists, or, at all events, is marked in Vedic Sanskrit only, that it was in fact unknown to scholars till the Veda began to be studied, and we shall then understand what it means that a change of accent observed in Sanskrit three thousand years ago, still determines the vowels of words which we use to-day. I wot is the AS. wât, the Gothic wait, I know. We have the infinitive preserved in the phrase to wit. This wit is the Sanskrit vid, to know. From it is formed in Sanskrit a perfect véda, having the meaning of the present, just like the Greek olda, i. e. Faida. The change of i into ai or é is due to the accent, which in Sanskrit falls in the singular on the first syllable. This diphthong ai in Sanskrit, ai in Gothic, becomes regularly â in AS., and o in English.

But that is not all. Why did the Greeks say oida in the singular, but toμev in the plural? In Greek the accent does not move, it remains throughout on the first syllable. But in Sanskrit the accent which is on the first syllable in the singular, must migrate in the plural to the last syllable. Why it did so, is a question difficult to answer, but the most natural reason seems to be that the differentiating terminations in the plural continued to be felt as such, and therefore retained their stress longer than those of the singular. Hence we say véda, véttha, véda, but vidmás, vidá, vidús. This rule and this rule alone enables

us to account for louer in ancient Greek, for Ich weiss and Wir wissen in modern German.

This will give you an idea of the solidarity, as the French call it, that binds the languages, and, if the languages, then the thoughts of all the members of the Aryan people together. And now as to their various degrees of relationship.

Anglo-Saxon,

English, as now spoken, may be traced back in one uninterrupted line to Anglo-Saxon. Of Anglo-Saxon we have the earliest documents in the seventh century, such as the Beowulf, an ancient epic of Teutonic origin. The language in which that poem is written was brought to England, or rather to the British isles, by emigrants and conquerors who came from the Continent. They were, as you know, Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, and they all spoke, not High German, but Low German. Low German does not mean vulgar German, but the German spoken in the low-lands of Germany. This Low German is in fact one of the four principal branches of the Teutonic class of the Aryan family, the other branches being Gothic, Scandinavian, and High German.

Gothic.

Gothic was spoken on the Danube in the fourth century, and it has left us the oldest specimens of Teutonic speech, the translation of the Bible of Ulfilas, who died in 381.

Continental Saxon.

Low German comprises the Saxon of the Continent, preserved to us in the Heljand, a poem of the ninth

century; the Anglo-Saxon, which we have already mentioned; the Old Frisian, known to us by documents of the thirteenth century, and slowly dying out at the present day; and lastly the Old Dutch, or Low Franconian, of which we have specimens in the socalled Carolingian Psalms, ascribed to the ninth century, and which is afterwards represented by Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Flemish, and the spoken Low Franconian.

Scandinavian.

The third branch, the Scandinavian, is represented by the Old Scandinavian literature between 800 and 1000 A.D., and is divided into (1) West-Nordish, i.e. Icelandic, and Norwegian, with a literature dating from the eleventh century; and the East-Nordish, that is, Swedish and Danish.

The ancient literature of Iceland, the two Eddas and numerous Sagas, will be of great importance to us for mythological purposes.

These three branches have one common characteristic feature, they are all under what is called 'Grimm's Law,' that is to say, to put it broadly, they offer an aspirate where the other Aryan languages have a tenuis, they offer a tenuis where the others have a media, and they offer a media where the others have an aspirate.

We must not suppose, because Gothic is in so decided a minority, as compared to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, or Slavonic, that therefore its aspirate is a corruption of a more ancient tenuis, or its media a corruption of a more primitive aspirate, or its tenuis a corruption of a former media. Looked upon as merely phonetic corruptions, such changes as t to th, th to d, and d to t in one and the same language would defy

all principles of phonetic science. Gothic is as old and as independent a national dialect of Aryan speech as Sanskrit, and, as such, had as much right to fix on tenuis, aspirate, and media for the discrimination of certain roots as Sanskrit had in fixing on media, tenuis, and aspirate. Thus the three roots which appear in Sanskrit as tar, dhar, and dar, would from the beginning appear in Gothic as thar, dar, and tar, but one and the same language would never change tar into thar, dhar into dar, and dar into tar. We know Gothic at a later time than Sanskrit, but that does not make Gothic a less primitive language than Sanskrit. And what applies to language, applies to mythology also. We know Vedic mythology at a much earlier date than Teutonic mythology, but that does not prove that the names and characters of the Teutonic gods were borrowed from the Veda.

Thorr and Thursday.

It is quite true, for instance, that if we want to know the original meaning of the Icelandic god Thorr, we have to trace back that word to the Anglo-Saxon Thunor, the modern thunder. It is true also that we have only to replace th by t, in order to be able to identify thunor with the Latin ton-are. But that does not prove that the Teutonic god Thorr, who still lives in the name of Thursday, dies Jovis, was not as old a god as any of the Vedic deities, and that from the very beginning he did not thunder with an initial aspirate, instead of an initial tenuis.

Týr and Tuesday.

If we apply Grimm's Law, we generally begin with what we are accustomed to call the classical languages,