turies, or even in a few generations, possibly in a single century, there should be a diversity of dialects which would be hardly intelligible beyond the respective families or tribes that spoke them. Small roving bands, scattering themselves over the unoccupied earth, with few wants to express, with no literature, no laws, no government, no social organization but that of the family, with no arts, dwelling in tents, in cabins, or in caves, could have had but the most meager vocabularies, and the rudest forms of speech. Moreover, even if the original speech had been as highly developed and inflected as the family of the Hebrew dialects, it could not but be that in a few generations, in such "oving communities ever coming into collision with other similar migratory bands, the inflectional elements, together with all the formative words which are used to show the relations of thought, would fall away, and language would lapse o its primitive stock of root-words denoting only objects, with perhaps the common sign of negation, and the few pronominal elements. In communities, especially, of but little intellectual activity, this would be inevitably the result; while families or tribes characterized by great activity of thought in social directions, by enterprise, by inventive or poetic genius, might develop, in brief periods of time, dialects of great richness in number of words, and also in formative elements.

Such was the condition of the race, and of its speech, in the period just preceding the dawn of history. The race as migratory; the speech was diversified.

2. The migrations of the human family were, under general and diverse providential promptings, yet controlled by the affinities of descent and blood.

The descendants of Shem spread themselves over the extensive plains drained by the Euphrates and the Tigris, and passed over southwardly into Arabia, and westwardly into Syria.

The descendants of Ham occupied territories along the

Persian Gulf and in Southern Arabia, and also the southern coasts of the Levant, with Egypt and Ethiopia.

The descendants of Japheth, in one division, occupied Armenia, and the coasts of the Euxine. In another they moved southeastwardly over into Media, and thence down into Hindostan. In other divisions still, they moved westwardly to the coasts and islands of the Ægean, and northwardly spread over the higher latitudes of Asia and of Europe. This branch of the descendants of Noah, choosing the less inviting regions, and the less propitious climates of the earth, scattered themselves the most widely, and became incomparably the most numerous of the three original branches, and most diversified in their speech. The great mass of the earth's inhabitants are descendants of Japheth; the great body of human dialects are Japhetic. Of Japhetic descent are the most elevated and also the most degraded portions of the race, as the most squalid poverty, the greatest ignorance, and the basest vice are found in closest proximity with the greatest affluence, the most advanced culture, and the highest refinement.

3. Human speech originates in the instinct divinely implanted in man's nature to communicate thought. The internal principle, the life of speech, is thought, not feeling, not purpose; and not mere thought, but thought that is to be communicated. While language proceeds from thought, it proceeds only in forms that can be understood in common by him that speaks, and by him that is spoken to. A primary and indispensable condition of the rise of speech is this that the thought be expressed in a sound that shall be identified with the thought in the minds of both speaker and hearer.

This sound, which shall be the symbol of the thought to be communicated, may, in some cases, be identified with it, by its being the natural expression of the thought. The root of the word horror, the elements of which are the rough breathing and the vibrant r connected by a related

vowel, raight easily symbolize the feeling of cold, of fear, and like sensations and emotions, when such a feeling happened to modify and characterize the thought to be communicated. From this partial fact, the interjectional theory of the origin of language has proceeded. See Part II., Chap. I., § 9.

The object thought may be identified with the sound. also through the resemblance of the sound to that which may be given out, or occasioned in some way by the object. Many attributes are symbolized through this mode of identification, as caw, coo, bark, yelp, whistle, creak, etc., suggest the objects which give forth sounds resembling these vocal utterances. From this partial fact another theory of the origin of speech has arisen, called the imitative, or socalled onomatopoetic theory.

The object thought may, further, be identified with the sound through some accidental association with it in time and place. Or still further, a visible object already named may be identified in some way with the thought to be expressed. Rock comes to denote thus, shelter from heat or storm, protection, security, and the like. So other senses furnish their respective symbols of objects. And generally through identification, in some way more or less direct, of the thought with the sound, in the common experience of speaker and hearer, all language comes to be.

4. The first words were doubtless names of objects, which were either subjects or attributes. A very common name of father, is a syllable composed of a p, b, m, or other labial consonant, and the vowel a. The child bestows that sound on its parent as a seen and known concrete being, without necessary reference to any one attribute. Or some attribute of the object may be in the thought, and the word is provided to denote that; man may have come from the already thought and named attribute expressed by that sound minding or thinking.

As all language contains, besides the proper pronominal

elements, two others the object or matter which is thought, and the thinking element itself, in the early stages of speech only the former of these two elements, the matter, finds distinct expression; the second element, the thought, is left to the hearer to supply. The copula is not expressed even in highly developed languages, unless emphasized; it is still wanting in the Chinese. The relations of objects in thought, and generally all the so-called formative elements, whether those of inflection or separate words, as conjunctions and prepositions, find expression only later in the progress of language. The order is: first, the matter thought is named; afterwards the forms of thought itself obtain distinct verbal expression. The sign of negation, however, comes very early, and from necessity, into language; not improbably is the first form for expressing a modification of the thought itself, as distinguished from the object of thought, or that of which we think. The first and lowest, and the most essential modification of thought, of a judgment, or assertion, is that which distinguishes a negative from an affirmative. The positive assertion needs no sign; Numa rex means Numa is king. The negative assertion requires a sign.

There is a third class of elements, distinct from the two mentioned, which came very early into language — not improbably the third in order of appearance. They are those which express the distinctions of persons, as speaking, spoken to, and spoken of the so-called pronominal elements. The articulate sounds taken to represent these distinctions are the same in languages otherwise most widely separated from one another.

5. Language, primitively, was in all probability chiefly monosyllabic. Such we should suppose, beforehand, would be the case; the thought would be symbolized in the simplest sound. The words in some of the least developed existing languages are of one syllable. But that dissyllabic words should occasionally be introduced is not at all improbable

in itself; and some of the ruder languages, as the Finnish, have dissyllabic roots.

The first noticeable step in the progress of language would be by the combination of these primitive monosyllables to express some modifications, either of property or relation. Thus, in Hungarian, kes means knife, em the person speaking; kes-em denotes my knife (=knife-me); nek means to, and kes-em-nek, to my knife. Here three separable words are joined together under one accent; but the roots are kept distinct in every combination, and the relation between them is not signified otherwise than by the mere union under the accent. As languages of the former class are called Monosyllabic, those of this class are called Agglutinative.

The third and last step is reached when an element is introduced to denote the relation or condition generally, and to be applied to all roots that admit the relation, as in the Latin cultellus meus, my knife, the us in meus expresses the kind of relation between the root me and knife. Languages using freely such forms are called Inflectional.

Linguistic science accordingly distributes languages into the three classes according as they are more characteristically monosyllabic without accentuated combinations, or with such accentuated combinations without proper inflections, or lastly inflectional. It must not be supposed, however, that any language actually exists which is purely monosyllabic or uninflectional, or that any inflectional language has not words formed as in the agglutinative dialects by mere combination of separable roots. See, for a fuller view of the subject of this section, Part II., Chap. I.

6. Of the Inflectional class of languages, those of Japhetic origin, called the Indo-European, have been gathered into one family, as they exhibit many sigus of a close affinity. The family, distributed in respect to geographical locality, includes in the Eastern Division, (1.) the Sanskrit, with its kindred Indian dialects, and (2.) the Iranian in