inquiry and the development of mind. Great
Britain—mother country and colonies—will, in
a few generations, have but one language. The
dialects of France are disappearing; so are
those of Italy. German literature is now only
represented by the Saxon tongue. The Castilian
is driving all the provincial idioms of Spain
from the field. The Russian, in the course of
centuries, will, probably, alone occupy the Slavonian
field. Hundreds upon hundreds of aboriginal
tongues have disappeared before the presence
of the Saxon and the Spanish races. As the
larger water-drops attract, absorb, and combine
with the lesser, the languages of commerce and
civilisation will, in progress of lime, take
possession of the whole social field, but rescuing
and appropriating whatever is valuable in the
instruments of communication, they displace.
The languages of future ages will be enriched
out of the spoils of the present and the past;
but of those now spoken, the greater part are
destined to decay and to disappear.

Little more than a generation has passed
since the Adelungs published their Mithridates
and the Catalogues of known languages, which
amount to several thousand. These are works
of great industry, but very incomplete, and
altogether insufficient to give a correct idea of
the multitudinous forms of speech which have
been invented by gregarious man. Imperfect
as is the list, many, of the idioms of which some
account is given are no longer existent.

When the study of language is entered on,
the first impulse is to seek resemblances and
affinities; but, as the field of observation is
extended, one is more and more struck with the
wonderful dissimilarities, the absence of links of
connexion, the radical differences in words, in
grammatical construction, in all that can be said
to give to languages their peculiar character.
Take any two portions of the globe of which it
can be certainly said the inhabitants have never
interchanged a thought—take for an example a
sentence from the idiom of an aboriginal tribe
of central Africa, compare it with one conveying
the same meaning from central America, or
central Asia, and you will be amazed with the
extraordinary unlikeness in the sound, the
arrangements, the number of words employed
for giving expression to the same idea. What
marvellous contrasts between the polysyllabic
languages of more than half the world, and the
monosyllabic languages of nearly the other
half. Explain—but you cannot explain—how
some nations revel in words of enormous length,
and make every modification of time, place, or
circumstance an instrument for adding new
elongations to what is already intolerably long,
and complicating the complicated with new
complications, while iu others not a word is to
be found exceeding a single syllable.

Not long ago I had an opportunity of watching
some of the phases by which the feeble
idioms die out, to be replaced by what is
stronger and more available for the purposes of
daily life, ln the Philippine Islands there
exist some forty or fifty vocabularies of Indian
tongues, mostly collected by the friars for
facilitating the main object of their missions—the
conversion of the heathen to Catholicism. At
the present time two native languages, the
Tagal and the Bisayan, are gradually invading
and absorbing the many native dialects which
are or were used among the aboriginal tribes;
while the Castilian, which, of course, represents
the highest civilisation, is, in its turn, intruding
on the Bisayan and the Tagal. It may be laid
down as a guiding and positive fact that where
there has been no communication between
human beings, there will be no resemblance, no
affinity, in the various modes by which expression
is given to thought or feeling. Non-
intercourse makes men alien to one another, by
denying to them the means of mutual
intercourse. There are in the lower regions of
savage life, spoken only by very small groups
of mankind, hundreds of idioms of which
every century sweeps away the traces. Where
wants are few, words will not be many. There
are tribes whose numerals only go out as far as
one, two, and three, at which point language
fails; and four, many, incalculable multitudes
are represented by the same word and
confounded in the same idea. Where the savage
neither cooks his food, but lives solely on wild
fruits, roots, or grubs; where he neither clothes
nor ornaments his person, but wanders about in
primitive nakedness; where he builds for
himself no habitation, but, like any other brute
animal, seeks shelter in the shades of the
forest, or the caves of the mountain, or holes
in the ground; where the seasons to his narrow
intellect are only represented by the
transitions of light and darkness, heat and cold, a
very small vocabulary will suffice; but when,
either from the visits of neighbours less savage
than himself, or his personal wanderings into
localities more advanced than his own,
something is presented to his senses which becomes
an object of desire, that object, which has no
name in his own rude jargon, will be
represented by the word which he first hears attached
to it, and in this simple way the groundwork is
laid for the extension of one and the exclusion
of another idiom. Again, the savage sees what
he had never seen before, the smoking of
tobacco. He imitates the smoker—the sensation
is pleasurable—a want is awakened. How
can he obtain, the tobacco? He must give
something for it, something that he can himself
provide. Then comes the idea of barter, of
value. One, two, three, much, many, are
insufficient for effecting the exchange; so he
finds four, five, six, and so forth, necessary
terms, and he learns them, and they become
part of his stock of words; but as he finds his
own words, one, two, three, &c., will not serve
him in his negotiations, he adopts the words of
corresponding meaning, which are understood by
the seller of the tobacco; and thus it is that
similar sounds representing numerals are more
widely spread than any other part of the
vocabulary. The name tobacco is in itself an
example of the association of new words with new