for the honour and dignity of our remote ancestors. The linguist is making a historical inquiry into the conditions of that branch of the human family to which we belong, and should no more be shocked at finding them talking in single syllables than dwelling in caves and huts of branches, or clad in leaves and skins. To require, indeed, for man's credit that he should have been sent upon the earth with a fully developed language miraculously placed in his mouth, with lists of nouns, verbs, and adverbs stored away in his memory, to be drawn upon at will, is not more reasonable than to require that the first human beings should have been born in full suits of clothes, and with neat cottages, not destitute of well-stocked larders, ready built over their heads. It surely is most of all to the honour of human nature that man should have been able, on so humble a foundation, to build up this wondrous fabric of speech; and also, as we may already say, that he should have been allowed to do so is more in accordance with the general plan of the Creator, who has endowed him with high capacities, and left him to work them out to their natural and intended results.
Nor, again, will any one venture to object that it would have been impossible to make so imperfect and rudimentary a language answer any tolerable purpose as a means of expression and communication—any one, at least, who knows aught of the present condition of language among the other races of the globe. One tongue, the Chinese—as we shall see more particularly farther on (in the ninth lecture)—has never advanced out of its primitive monosyllabic stage; its words remain even to the present day simple radical syllables, closely resembling the Indo-European roots, formless, not in themselves parts of speech, but made such only by their combination into sentences, where the connection and the evident requirements of the sense show in what signification and relation each is used. Yet this scanty and crippled language has served all the needs of a highly cultivated and literary people for thousands of years.
After these few words of reply to one or two of the difficulties which sometimes suggest themselves at first blush to
17
