mind to enable articulate sound to express the thoughts of man. Nature, outward objects, produce an impression upon the mind through our senses; Spirit, the divine intellect of man, perceives it and becomes conscious of it, and Sound, the word, reflects the thus created thought back again to the outward world. This is all we know, perhaps all we are allowed to know, of the first origin of Language. God, who Himself was once the Word, did not name the works of His hand upon earth Himself, but caused man to behold them and to name them. To exercise this high prerogative, granted to man only, He endowed him with organs of speech, superior to all others in the circle of earthly creation, and thus completed man, made in His image, after His likeness.

CHAPTER II.

UNITY O F LANGUAGE.

Various Theories-Biblical Theory-Supported by Science-Languages poin. to a common Fountain-head.

THE same mystery which thus veils the first results of this heaven-born gift, shrouds the first epoch in the history of language. We know that man is never found without speech. The discoveries of our day, whether directed to distant oceans and ice-bound continents, or to monuments of hoary antiquity nd annals of times beyond the memory of man, reveal to us no

new variety of the race without its speech, no unknown period of the history of man without its language. We know, that since the first child was born upon earth, the sweet names of father and mother have been heard, and that, since nations began to wander from land to land, their great hymn of a thousand tongues has not ceased to ascend to heaven, praising Him who first taught the babe to stammer the name of its mother, and who thus gave life and spirit to the very breath of the air. We know that, as there is but one God and one mankind, so that perpetual hymn of countless nations forms but one great harmonious whole, though many a choir and many a single voice mingle in it with accents of their own and tones as varied as the very voices of heaven.

But we do not know if it pleased the Creator to grant speech but once, to one pair, or if the gift was repeated to various firstborn of different races. The unity of the human race, once decided, would determine the unity of language also. This seems to be the tendency of modern science. Some French naturalists and philosophers, it is true, believed the race of Adam to be but one of many distinct creations of man; Agas siz and other eminent scholars of America believe the same, or go even so far as Malte-Brun, who ascribed to each part of the globe its own race, of unknown origin. Niebuhr was inclined to think that the earliest inhabitants of Rome were a distinct race; and even the great Humboldt believes, that the Indians of America may have been a stock of their own; whilst Goethe thought that the first pairs were created twelve at a time. These and similar views excepted, the researches of eminent geologists, the investigation of able philosophers, and the close

and patient study of the phenomena of nature as well as of the physical history of man, seem all to furnish more and more convincing proofs of the unity of the human race. The very fact, moreover, that language is found to exist at all, and to exist among every people and every community of the earth, even those most degraded and isolated tribes which are lowest in the scale of civilization, is, in itself, a most cogent argument for the common origin of man as a species.

The devout believer will, of course, attach the very greatest importance to the fact that the word of God distinctly states, that man and language were both created by the Maker of all things and found together in paradise, and that, consequently, the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. He refers naturally, with all the force derived from his faith in the inspired character of these writings, to the curse which, at a later period, drove man from the garden of Eden, and compelled him to work "in the sweat of his face" to make the earth, which, in paradise, had been self-productive, now support him in return for his "tilling the ground from which he was taken." Thus the descendants of the first pair found themselves, as they multiplied and spread over the face of the earth, in new homes, and in constant struggle with a nature every where different. This led them to form, each race in its own portion of the globe, a new world of thoughts, and for these, new expressions and words. These differences became more marked and permanent, when the Lord was grieved at man in His heart, because the people, which were still one and had one language," were corrupt and presumed to be like unto Him. God determined then to defeat their self-conceived material unity, which they preferred

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THE COMMON ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES.

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the higher spiritual.unity, to which He meant to lead them. through Christianity. He scattered them abroad from Babel upon the face of the earth, and confounded their language, so that they might not understand one another's speech. Thus the human race was divided into distinct nations, all "after their families, after their tongues," and dispersed into localities so distant and detached, as to give both cause and scope for the formation of new languages. Some of these stand seemingly isolated in origin, and independent of such early connection; but all show, more or less, that even their bulk is but a part of the whole, from which circumstances have separated them, but with which they are still connected by a thousand delicate fibres and tender, irresistible affections.

These views, incontrovertible to the Christian, are strongly supported by the results of modern scientific researches. They seem, at least, to tend more and more to the establishment of one common origin for all language; and although Comparative Philology, which is necessarily most interested in the question of unity, does not, as yet, establish or irrefutably confirm such a belief, it furnishes still, at every stage of its rapid development as a science, new arguments and new proofs in its favor. The limits of our knowledge alone seem to limit our belief, and as the one expands by the successful labors of modern philologists, the other grows stronger and firmer. It is but quite recently that even the Indo-European languages, the best known of all, have been proved to belong to one common stock, and to be derived from one common fountain. The principle, that the original elements of all these languages are to be found in their so-called roots, once admitted, these roots soon showed such

analogies as to point, with absolute certainty, to one great mother tongue. Avoiding, then, the two great sins of former philologists, a loose comparison of single words, and, on the other hand, hasty conclusions drawn from a few isolated, startling facts, there was such a resemblance found to prevail among all the idioms of this family as to warrant the assumption of their common origin. Now it is perfectly logical to conclude that, as the Romance languages point back to their common ancestor, Latin, and the Indo-European languages to the one great, though yet unknown, source and locality of the ancient Sanscrit, so the same process of investigation, applied to larger classes and finally to all languages, may at last produce similar results; nor has this conclusion failed to obtain confirmation by the latest researches.

CHAPTER III. ·

Opinions of Pritchard, Picket, and Bopp-Of Keyser and Retzius-Of Bunsen, Humboldt, &c.-Words common to all Idioms-No positive result as yet obtained.

WHEN Pritchard, Picket, and Bopp substantiated the claims. of the Celtic to be ranked as one of the great Indo-European family of languages, they furnished thus new evidence in favor of the assertion of the great author of Kosmos, that "with the increase of our knowledge in every direction, there is found continually less and less reason for the former belief, that the