chu within the same circle as still questionable. But even between the three former, the material evidence is but weak and scanty, as compared with that presented in the Indo-European idioms, of which specimens were given above, in the fifth lecture; no investigator has ever been able to draw up tables of pervading correspondences in the Scythian tongues, which should at once illustrate and prove their genetic unity. It is possible, of course, that the races who speak these tongues may have been separated longer than the Indo-European, enough longer for a more sweeping effacement of the evidence of their common descent; or, again, that the lack of those remains of dialects of great antiquity which so aid our researches into the history of our own family of speech is what prevents our recognition of the links that bind the Scythian languages into one. It may be, too, that these have possessed as much more variable and mobile a character than the Indo-European forms of speech as the latter than the Semitic: this, indeed, has been repeatedly assumed to be true, and even defended by theoretical and à priori arguments; but I am not aware that it has ever been established by proper linguistic evidence and reasoning, and it is strongly opposed by the coherence of the several branches, and the near accordance of the dialects composing them. And, were either or both of these possible explanations of the discordances of the Scythian tongues proved true, they would by no means settle the question in favour of the unity of the family; they would simply forbid us to maintain too dogmatically that the tongues were not and could not be related as members of one family; before consenting positively to regard them as thus related, we should still be entitled to demand tangible evidences; if not correspondences of material, then at least definite and distinctive correspondences of form. And, as already intimated, a morphological resemblance is the ground on which the claim of Scythian unity is chiefly founded; their fundamental common characteristic is that they follow what is styled an agglutinative type of structure. That is to say, the elements out of which their words are formed are loosely put together, instead of being closely compacted, or fused into one; they
