anatomy of languages as an instrument for facilitating his efforts to travel backwards into the past. To the study of languages he accordingly applied himself with incredible zeal. He laid ambassadors and Jesuit missionaries under contribution for philological facts. In prosecuting this one department of investigation, he maintained a vast correspondence. Facts gathered from China and the Eastern tongues served to animate his exertions, and added new materials for speculation. Not content with the records and memorials of the past, contained in the words and works of man, he interrogated the globe itself. In his speculations on the physical vestiges of its early history, we find curious anticipations of recent geological hypotheses. These may be seen in a small tract entitled Protogea.[1]
Leibnitz was able, in an unusual degree, to combine the external and the contemplative life. A great part of his time was busied with the conduct of civil and ecclesiastical negotiations. His correspondence regarding the unity of the Church, with the Landgrave of Hesse-Rheinfels, with Arnauld, with Spinola, and with Bossuet, which occupied more or less of his time during twenty years, deserves some distinct notice. The reunion of the Protestants with the Church of Home was then placed by Leibnitz in the first rank of those questions on a settlement of which his heart was set. By his philosophic mind this adjustment was felt to be nearly related to his previously ascertained speculative doctrine of the theocracy, and a universal hier-
- ↑ See Dutens' Edition, vol. v.
