them; the facts it presents are erroneously accepted as ultimate, cutting off further inquiry; portions of its existing material which are of modern growth, or the artificial productions of Hindu scholasticism, are perversely used as of avail for Indo-European etymology: and such abuse has naturally provoked from some scholars a distrust of its genuine claims to regard: but, stripping off all exaggerations, and making all due allowances, the Sanskrit is still the main-stay of Indo-European philology; it gave the science a rapid development which nothing else could have given; it imparted to its conclusions a fulness and certainty which would have been otherwise unattainable.
Such is the constitution of the grand division of human speech to which our own language belongs. That its limits have been everywhere traced with entire exactness cannot, of course, be claimed; other existing dialects may yet make good their claim to be included in it—and it is beyond all reasonable question that, as many of its sub-branches have perished without leaving a record, so various of its branches, fully coördinate with those we have reviewed, must have met a like fate. We may now proceed to glance briefly at some of the grounds of the preëminent importance with which it is invested.
One source of the special interest which we feel in the study of Indo-European language lies in the fact that our own tongue is one of its branches. In the moral and intellectual world, not less than in the physical, everything cannot but appear larger in our eyes according as it is nearer to us. This would be a valid consideration with any race upon earth, since, for each, its own means of communication and instrument of thought is also the record of its past history, and must be its agency of future improvement in culture, and therefore calls for more study in order to its fuller comprehension, and its development and elevation, than should be given to any other tongue, of however superior intrinsic value. But we are further justified in our somewhat exclusive interest by the position which our languages, and the races which speak them, hold among other languages and races. It is true, as was claimed at the outset of these lectures, that linguistic
