knife of a grammarian. Culture chooses, from among the varieties of equivalent form, utterance, and phrase which a defective communication has allowed to spring up within the limits of the same community, those which shall be accepted as most worthy of preservation. It maintains what is good, warns against abuses, and corrects offences committed by a part against the authority of prevailing usage. A cultivated language is thus simply one whose natural growth has gone on for a certain period under the conscious and interested care of its best speakers; which has been placed in their charge, for the maintenance of a standard, for the repression of disfiguring alterations, for enrichment with expressions for higher thought and deeper knowledge; for the enforcement, in short, of their own studied usages of speech upon the less instructed and more heedless masses of a community.
It is obviously futile to attempt to draw anywhere a dividing line in the development of language—to say, these differences on the one side are the result of later linguistic growth; those, on the other side, are original, a part of the primitive variety and indefiniteness of human speech. The nature and uses of speech, and the forces which act upon it and produce its changes, cannot but have been essentially the same during all the periods of its history, amid all its changing circumstances, in all its varying phases; and there is no way in which its unknown past can be investigated, except by the careful study of its living present and its recorded past, and the extension and application to remote conditions of laws and principles deduced by that study. Like effects, as we have already had occasion to claim, imply like causes, not less in the domain of language than in that of physical science; and he who pronounces the origin and character of ancient dialects and forms of speech to be fundamentally different from those of modern dialects and forms of speech can only be compared with the geologist who should acknowledge the formation by aqueous action of recent gravel and pebble-beds, but should deny that water had anything to do with the production of ancient sandstones and conglomerates.
