word to indicate what tree or house. They did not even say oak-tree; their most general designation still indicates the particular species, if not the individual oak. There are no such words as adjectives and nouns distinct from each other; but the same utterance designates indefinitely things and their qualities.

A pronominal sense is also mingled in the same indefinite mass. They cannot say father, son, master separately. They must say whose father, or what father. The missionaries, therefore, cannot translate the Doxology literally, but teach them to chant: "Glory be to our Father and to his Son and to their Holy Ghost."

Nor is this pronomino-, adjectivo-substantive utterance the extent of indefiniteness. This agglomerate of sounds takes another modification of utterance, and expresses an assertion or activity—becomes a sort of verb, which has a sort of conjugation.

By inserted or supplementary sounds are expressed or suggested times, modes, voices of all sorts, passive, middle, animate, inanimate, negative, frequentative, causative, so that the forms of a verb are five or six thousand in number. And this assertive form is indeed a verb, the word by eminence, for it swallows up all others.

Besides all the mass which has already been mentioned, the verb expresses its object in the same word and the adverbial modifications.

What we mean by parts of speech remains undistinguished in these languages of nature. Speech is with them a perpetual creation of utterances to image indefinitely the total picture in their minds exactly as it is impressed by nature. "The Indian does not analyze his thoughts or separate his utterances," as Bancroft expresses it; his thoughts rush forth in a troop. His speech is as a kindling cloud, not as radiant points of light." To take a figure from an art not then known, it is like a daguerreotype of a landscape, where every leaf is quivering in the breeze, struck off at once in a blur by the sunbeams, not like an ideal landscape drawn in distinct and imperishable colors by the successive touches of the pencil of Turner.

These general traits are given only in generals to illustrate the indefiniteness of the languages of nature. They would, of course, need qualification, and the statement of many exceptions, if a description of any particular dialect were intended. Like other products of nature, language answers only generally to a general description.

The first great step, which I shall mention in the development of language, gives us what are called the inflected languages.

In these, the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, are analyzed and definitely separated from each other, but the syllables merely indicative of relation are still left in a state of fusion with the words indicative of notions; utterances equivalent, in an indefinite and little precise manner, to pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, expressing or suggesting the prominent relations in space and time, and those of cause, measure, degree, mode, and the personal relations, remain fused with the roots standing for the ideas between which they express or suggest the relations. The notional and relational are two in the spontaneous consciousness, but only one in reflection and in grammar.

These are the peoples to whom our civilization dates back, the languages which have been studied as models ever since language has been studied at all-the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, the German, the Anglo-Saxon. If scholars had directed the world, the development of speech would have stopped here, and language would have kept its wings forever; but true hands, with all the fingers and thumbs, were to come. Prepositions accumulated. The general indefinite designation of relations by case-endings became useless and embarrassing. The analysis of mode and time became more and more refined. Separate words were adopted to express these refinements, and the comparatively indefinite designation of tense, mode, and person by inflection-endings became useless and embarrassing. Languages were becoming more analytic all over Europe and Arian Asia.

Just at the most favorable moment there were thrown to

gether on the island of Great Britain picked men of two great

peoples, speaking representative languages of two great stocks, the Romanic and Teutonic. They had already been prepared for mutual interaction. The Anglo-Saxon had newly combined the dialects of many tribes, and had not yet grown into literary consciousness. The Normans still felt their Scandinavian blood, and had northern tongues, as well as northern arms. They could the more readily fuse with Angle or Saxon, Celt or Gaul.

Here, then, was the aboriginal Briton, with a speech abundant, flexible, artificial, still telling of his home in the mystic East, but with the weird and solemn tones and idiom which become the children of the old oak forests of the North-the nation of the mistletoe and the Druid;-a wonderful tongue, a faint echo of which, in the imitations of Ossian, has since sighed and moaned through all Europe. This grand old stock had the traits of the primitive races; it was proud and unyielding, hard to develop or mix, but softened somewhat by the story of Christ.

*

Here were the Saxons, with their large and well-formed hands, crafty hands, full of nerves as the heads of another race; the race of intellectual manual labor; the race of freedom, tall and strong; the fair-haired, blue-eyed, shapely race, who love home, and one wife to rule it as lady and mother.

They spoke a language of the heart, rich in dear brooding tones of warm affection-in simple hearty words for home things and feelings, for every dimple that smiles on the face of home; rich in simple hearty words for the nature in which they lived, their flocks, and herds, and crops, the sun, moon, stars, the clouds, the seasons, the weather, the tides; for this was a people at one with nature, and they kept in their purest forms the sounds which are the audible representative of nature —the common heritage of the Arian races. Come what might, here were sounds that could not die, while the love of nature and of home was warm in the hearts of the race.

* Sir Gareth had "the fairest and the largest hands that ever man saw."-Mort d'Arthure, 1,232.

"The German's wit is in his fingers."-- George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, p. 302.

open

And here too were the Normans-every man a prince—the born rulers of the world, the knights of old romance, whose marrow grew in boats on the stormy northern seas, who fought with the heart of lions, who loved as they fought, and sung their own combats and loves to the music of the language of sunny France. They spoke a language which was the queen of the Romanic languages, the language of chivalry, of compliment, of courtesy, the language of the camp, the joust, the court. The last stage of the Latin, with half its strength shorn, and divorced from simple nature, it was yet fit to be the speech of gallant chevaliers and fair dames all the world over, as well as on the soil of la belle France. The immediate result of throwing these nations together, was a chaos of language, hissing, sputtering, bubbling like a witch's caldron. For a century, every man blurted out the sounds which suited his whim, and explained himself with his sword. The laws of the Saxon tongue were broken. The laws of the Norman tongue were broken. The Celtic would not mix.

But apparent chaos is the condition of a new Cosmos. One who had watched this chaos of language after the Norman conquest, might have seen gradually emerging a new life, as the smoke that had poured from the coffer of the fisherman in the Arabian tale, cloudy and shapeless, thickened slowly into a gigantic shape, and one of the genii stood before him.

Perhaps the first fact which would strike the observer of this new being-this infant language, is its prodigious appetite and digestion. It is a man-child, and has the stomach of an ostrich. It is a universal imbiber. No words come amiss to it; whether it is the home-made, week-day, Saxon or Celt, festival Norman, the Sunday Latin and Greek of the Church, foreign dainties brought in by the merchant Portuguese, or strange knicknacks found in the East by Crusaders—nothing comes amiss to the new speech; it will try its jaws on all utterances. And its digestion proves equal to its appetite. The sesquipedalia verba of Greek and Roman are taken up if expressive to his sensitive ear, analyzed if they have an expressive root; or, it may be, he craunches them, as Swift's lady

does the wing of lark, bones and all, between his teeth, and grinds them to monosyllables in a trice.

It imbues all words with its own spirit. By some modification of articulation, adjusting it to its own laws of sound, by some variation of meaning or association, each word is given a new citizenship, and becomes obedient to the laws of the new language-a loyal member of the new body; just as when some powerful helix, connecting the poles of an electrical battery, stands ready with its hollow coil, and every bar of steel which is dropped through receives at once a new power, and becomes henceforth a magnet.

In this respect, the English differs from the Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic languages; they like home-made words and cannot away with foreign manufactures. This quality fits the English to be a universal language-to be the exponent of a race, who are to be the freemen of the world, and to extend their citizenship to all nations. Here is already a prophecy of our great republic.

The second fact which would strike the observer of the new language is, that it is a root-speaker. It drops the terminations of the Saxon, and the Latin, and uses the simple fundamental syllables common to all the Arian race, which are naturally expressive to them of substantive thought. It rejects the various indefinite relational syllables, and takes up or makes separate words to express each shade of relation. Relations and notions are at last on the same footing in speech. This people is not content to speak the substantive ideas, and leave you to guess their relations from a few indefinite articulations for cases, or modes; they will be as precise about relations as any thing else; they will say just what they mean every time they speak, to the minutest shade of relation.

Grammar and logic become one to this people, and both are at one with nature. They will not be obliged by mixing up notions and relations in the same word to say what they do not mean. They cease to use grammatical gender, for example, which mixes up men, women, and things, on the hint of a sound. They will not be made to call their women things, as the Germans do every time they call them wife. Here at last