His ways, through long years of noble and self-sacrificing toil.

It has, indeed, been asserted that the languages of some barbarous nations-for instance, the Greenlanders and the North American Indians-are of so rich, so perfect, and so artistic a structure, that they could not possibly have been achieved by them in their present condition, and furnish a proof that they have sunk into savagery from a state of higher culture. Du Ponceau' speaks in the most glowing terms of the genius displayed in the infinite variety and perfect regularity of those languages. Charlevoix calls attention to the beautiful union of energy and nobleness in the Huron, where, as in the Turkish, tout se conjugue.' Dr. James says that there are seven or eight thousand possible forms of the verb in Chippeway. Appleyard 2 tells us that the South African languages, though spoken by tribes confessedly uncivilised and illiterate, are highly systematic and truly philosophical;' that in Kafir there are a hundred different forms for the pronoun its,' and that the system of alliteration maintained throughout its grammatical forms is one of the most curious and ingenious ever known.' Threlkeld 1 tells us similar facts about the Australian dialects; and Caldwell, in his 'Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages,' occupies many pages with the laws of euphonic permutation of consonants and harmonic se

6

1 Et. du Ponceau, Mém. sur le Syst. Gram. de quelques Nations indiennes, passim. A most valuable and brilliant work.

2 Kafir Grammar, pref.

Id. p. 66; p. 6, note, &c.

4 Threlkeld, Australian Gram. p. 8. 5 Dravidian Grammar, pp. 126-138.

quence of vowels, which exist both in those and in the Scythian languages. Instances of similar exuberance and complexity in savage languages might be indefinitely multiplied; and the argument that they imply an intellectual power superior to what we now find in these races, and that they therefore prove a condition previously exalted, is so plausible that in a former 2 work I regarded it as convincing. Further examination has For this apparent wealth

entirely removed this belief. of synonyms and grammatical forms is chiefly due to the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction. It would be not only no advantage, but even an impossible incumbrance to a language required for literary purposes. The 'transnormal' character of these tongues only proves that they are the work of minds incapable of all subtle analysis, and following in one single direction an erroneous and partial line of development. When the mind has nothing else to work upon, it will expend its energy in a lumbering and bizarre multiplicity of linguistic expedients, and by richness of expression will try to make up for poverty of thought. Many of these vaunted languages (e. g. the American and Polynesian), -these languages which have countless forms of conjugation, and separate words for the minutest shades of specific meaning, these holophrastic languages, with their jewels fourteen syllables long,' to express the commonest and most familiar objects,-so far from proving a once-elevated intellectual condition of the people who speak them, have not even yet arrived at

1 Appleyard, p. 69; Du Ponceau, p. 95; Howse, Cree Gram. p. 7; Pott, Die Ungleichheit d. menschl. Raçen, p. 253; Steinthal, Charakteristik, p. 176; Maury, La Terre et l'Homme, p. 463.

2 Origin of Lang. p. 28. See too Vater, Mithrid. iii. 328.

:

the very simple abstraction required to express the verb 'to be,' which Condillac assumed to be the earliest of invented verbs! The state of these languages, so far from proving any retrogression from previous culture, is an additional proof of primordial and unbroken barbarism. The triumph of civilisation is not complexity but simplicity and unless an elaborate Polytheism be more intellectual than Monotheism,-unless the Chinese ideography, with its almost indefinite number of signs, be a proof of greater progress than our alphabet,—then neither is mere Polysynthetism and exuberance of synonyms a proof of actual culture in the past, or possible progress in the future. If language proves anything, it proves that these savages must have lived continuously in a savage condition.2

I will here quote two high and unbiassed authorities in support of the same conclusion:

It has already been observed,' says Mr. Garnett,3 'that very exaggerated and erroneous ideas have been advanced respecting the structure of the class of languages of which we have been treating in the present paper. They have been represented as the products of deep philosophical contrivance, and totally different in organisation from those of every part of the known

! In American and Polynesian languages there are forms for 'I am well,' 'I am here,' &c., but not for 'I am.' In Elliot's Indian Bible 'I am that I am,' is rendered I do, I do' (compare the French idiom 'il fait nuit,' &c.). More than this, savage nations cannot even adopt the verb 'to be.' A negro says, 'Your hat no lib that place you put him in.' 'My mother done lib for devilly' (=is dead).-Hutchinson, Ten Years' Wanderings, p. 32.

2 See among many other authorities Pott, Die Ungl. der menschl. Raçen, p. 86; Du Ponceau, Transl. of Zeisberger's Lenni-Lenape Gram. p. 14; Crawfurd, Malay Gram. i. 68; Adelung, Mithrid. iii. 6, 205. 3 Philological Essays, p. 321.

world. The author of "Mithridates" regards it as an astonishing phenomenon that a people like the Greenlanders, struggling for subsistence among perpetual ice and snow, would have found the means of constructing such a complex and artificial system. It is conceived that there cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that a complicated language is like a chronometer, or a locomotive engine, a product of deep calculation, and preconceived adaptation of its several parts to each other. The compound parts are rather formed like crystals, by the natural affinity of the component elements; and whether the forms are more or less complex, the principle of aggregation is the same.'

"In those which abound most in inflections,' says Mr. Albert Gallatin,' 'nothing more has been done than to effect, by a most complex process, and with a cumbersome and unnecessary machinery, that which, in almost every other language, has been as well, if not better performed by the most simple means. Those transitions, in their complexness, and in the still visible amalgamation of the abbreviated pronouns with the verb, bear, in fact, the impress of primitive and unpolished languages.'

Language, then, from whatever point of view we regard it, seems to confirm instead of weakening the inference to which we are irresistibly led by Geology, History, and Archæology-that Man,

The heir of all the ages in the foremost files of Time,

is a very much nobler and more exalted animal than the shivering and naked savage whose squalid and ghastly relics are exhumed from Danish kjökken-möddings, and

1 Archæologia Americana, ii. p. 203, quoted by Mr. Garnett.

glacial deposits, and the stalactite flooring of freshlyopened caves. These primeval lords of the untamed creation, so far from being the splendid and angelic beings of the poet's fancy, appear to have resembled far more closely the Tasmanian, the Fuegian, the Greenlander, and the lowest inhabitants of Pelagian caverns or Hottentot kraals. We believe that in Scripture itself there are indications that they appeared upon the surface of the globe many ages before those simple and noble-minded shepherds from whose loins have sprung the Aryans and Semites-those two great races to whom all the world's progress in knowledge and civilisation has been solely due.