generations, at the bidding of imperious circumstances; as the present stability of the same language is an extreme example of what favouring circumstances can do to prevent change, and maintain the integrity of speech.
The facts and conditions which we have been considering are of no exceptional character: on the contrary, they are common to all the forms of speech current among the sons of men. Throughout the world, the same description, in its essential features, will be found to hold good. Every spoken language is a congeries of individual signs, called words; and each word (with the rare exception of the actual additions made by individuals to language, of which we shall take account later) was learned by every person who employs it from some other person who had employed it before him. He adopted it as the sign of a certain idea, because it was already in use by others as such. Inner and essential connection between idea and word, whereby the mind which conceives the one at once apprehends and produces the other, there is none, in any language upon earth. Every existing form of human speech is a body of arbitrary and conventional signs for thought, handed down by tradition from one generation to another, no individual in any generation receiving or transmitting the whole body, but the sum of the separate givings and takings being effective to keep it in existence without essential loss. Yet the process of traditional transmission always has been, is now, and will ever continue to be, in all parts of the world, an imperfect one: no language remains, or can remain, the same during a long period of time. Growth and change make the life of language, as they are everywhere else the inseparable accompaniment and sign of life. A language is living, when it is the instrument of thought of a whole people, the wonted means of expression of all their feelings, experiences, opinions, reasonings; when the connection between it and their mental activity is so close that the one reflects the other, and that the two grow together, the instrument ever adapting itself to the uses which it is to subserve. The ways in which this adaptation takes place, and the causes which
