existence, when they—whether from want of room, or family discords, or the restlessness of awakening curiosity and unconscious sense of power, or from all these combined-begin to separate, and detachment after detachment leaves the mother trunk, never to return and never again to meet, save in ages to come, mostly as enemies, with no remotest memory of a long severed tie, of a common origin.

8. As tradition itself does not begin its doubtful records till ages after this original separation, and the dawn of history finds most of the nations which we ascribe to the Aryan stock established on the lands of which they had severally taken possession, it follows that we have just been contemplating a picture for which we have not the slightest tangible materials. No monuments, no coins, inscriptions, hieroglyphic scrawls, reach back as far as the time we have endeavored to retrace. Indeed, the first really historical monuments of any kind at our command are the inscriptions, caused to be engraved in various parts of Hindustân, on pillars and rocks, by ASHOKA, a king who reigned as late as 250 B.C. The same applies to architecture; no buildings or ruins of buildings are to be traced further back than 500 B.C. Was it then an imaginary sketch, the features of which were put together at random, supplied by fancy or any trite description of pastoral life? So far from it, we can boldly say: would that all information that comes down to us as history were as true to nature, as well authenticated, as this short sketch of an age on which not even the marvellously trained skill of modern historical investigation could fasten

by so much as a single thread. But where history throws down the web, philology takes it up and places in our hands the threads which connect us with that immeasurable past-threads which we have held and helped to spin all the days of our lives, but the magic power of which we did not suspect until the new science, Ariadnê-like, taught us where to fasten them, when we have but to follow; these threads are our languages.

9. A hundred years ago, several eminent English scholars resided in India, as servants of the East India Company, and, unlike their coarse and ignorant predecessors, thought it their duty to become familiar both with the spoken dialects and the literary languages of the country they helped to govern. They were earnest and enthusiastic men, and the discovery of an intellectual world so new and apparently different from ours drew them irresisti bly on, into deeper studies than their duties required. Warren Hastings, then the head of the executive government, representing the Company in India, cordially patronized their efforts, from political reasons as well as from a personal taste for scholarly pursuits, and not content with lending them his powerful moral countenance, gave them material assistance, and even urgently commended them to the Board of Directors at home. It was then that CHARLES WILKINS translated portions of the great national epic, the MAHABHARATA, and compiled the first Sanskrit Sanskrit grammar grammar in English; that Sir WILLIAM JONES' translated the national code

The old enemy and traducer of Anquetil Duperron.-See Story of Media, etc., pp. 12-15.

known as "THE LAWS OF MANU"; while COLEBROOKE wrote masterly treatises on Hindu law, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. These indefatigable learners could not but be struck with the exceeding resemblance, nay frequently the obvious identity, between a great number of Sanskrit words and the corresponding words in all or many of the living languages of Europe, as well as in the dead tongues of ancient Greece and Rome, the old Teutonic and Slavic idioms. The great future importance of this discovery at once flashed on the mental vision of these gifted and highly trained students, and comparative studies were zealously entered upon. Great and noble was the work which these men did, with results, on the whole, marvellously correct; but, as is always the case with such zealous pioneering in a new field, some of the conclusions they arrived at were necessarily immature and misleadingly positive and sweeping. Thus it was for many years universally believed that Sanskrit was the mother tongue, to which all languages could be traced. This theory was not by far as absurd as that which had been set up some time previously by certain religious zealots who, from an exaggerated regard, untutored by science, for all that is connected with the "inspired books" of our creed, went so far as to assert that Hebrew was the mother of all the

languages in the world. Still it might, from its plausibility and the large percentage of truth it contained, have done much harm, by leading people to imagine that they had touched the goal, when, in reality, they were at the initial stage of knowledge;

but the question was placed on its proper ground by the somewhat later discovery of a still more ancient language, standing to Sanskrit in the relation of Latin to French, Italian, and Spanish, or Old German to English. Since then JACOB GRIMM discovered the law that rules the changes of consonants in their passage from language to language, the law that bears his name, although it is but one among the many titles to glory of that most indefatigable, most luminous of searchers. The unity of Aryan speech is now established beyond the possibility of a doubt. 10. This common language, or--more correctly -this common ancestor of the so-called Aryan family of tongues, would prove, could it be raised from the dead, to be that of the race, whose mode of life and state of culture we just now attempted to reconstruct. Reconstruct from what? From nothing but the words, which are the only heirloom they have transmitted to us, their late and widely scattered successors. Only words. But as words stand for thoughts, and knowledge, and feelings, this heirloom implies all our histories, all our philosophical systems, our poetry-in fact, all that we are and will be. It is the nutshell in the fairy tale, out of which the endless web is forthcoming, unrolling fold after fold of marvellous designs and matchless variety of color.

11. If, then, in the oldest offspring of this immemorial language, we find words which we meet alike in most Aryan languages of a later growth and in our present living ones, unchanged or having undergone such slight alterations that any intelligent per

of

son will immediately know them, and if those words, all or nearly all, concern the most essential and therefore most ordinary features of social and domestic life, the simplest pursuits and relations and chief necessaries of our material existence-have we not there evidence amounting to proof, that the relations determined by those words existed, that the things called by those names were in use, the actions expressed by those verbs were habitually done, amongst and by those men, the ancestors of many us, several, nay, many thousands of years ago? And are not the "points" thus obtained sufficient, lacking any visible or tangible materials, to arrive at something much more substantial and reliable than mere conjecture on what the life, pursuits, and ideas. of those men may and must have been? Could we apply the test to the short sketch from which we started, it would bear out every single word of it,literally "every word," for it is composed of nothing but words, which have been transmitted from the original language to all the languages of the Aryan stock, i. e., later Sanskrit and the Hindu dialects, ancient Avestan and modern Persian, and the tongues of the Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Slavic, and Celtic branches.

12. Almost everybody will have noticed that words go in families. That is-several words, and sometimes a great many, are connected with or derived from one another, all expressing different forms or shadings of one common fundamental idea. On examining such words more closely, it will turn out that this common idea resides in a cer