Gebelin's Monde primitif – we shall see at once how far superior the Spanish Jesuit is to the French philosopher. Gebelin treats Persian, Armenian, Malay, and Coptic as dialects of Hebrew; he speaks of Bask as a dialect of Celtic, and he tries to discover Hebrew, Greek, English, and French words in the idioms of America. Hervas, on the contrary, though embracing in his catalogue five times the number of languages that were known to Gebelin, is most careful not to allow himself to be carried away by theories not warranted by the evidence before him. It is easy now to point out mistakes and inaccuracies in Hervas, but I think that those who have blamed him most are those who ought most to have acknowledged their obligations to him. To have collected specimens and notices of more than three hundred languages, is no small matter. But Hervas did more. He himself composed grammars of more than forty languages. He was one of the first to point out that the true affinity of languages must be determined chiefly by grammatical evidence, not by mere similarity of words. He proved, by a comparative list of declensions and conjugations, that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Aramaic are all but dialects of one original language, and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic. He scouted the idea of deriving all languages of mankind from Hebrew. He had perceived clear traces of affinity between Chinese and Indo-Chinese dialects; also between Hungarian, Lapponian, and Finnish, three dialects now classed as members of the Turanian family. He had proved that Bask was not, as was commonly supposed, a Celtic dialect, but an independent language... Nay, one of the most brilliant discoveries
