less than dissimilation and the formation of new dialects, are all the time going on in human communities, according as conditions favour the one or the other class of effects; and a due consideration of both is necessary, if we would comprehend the history of any tongue, or family of tongues. Let us look at one or two examples, which shall serve to illustrate their joint and mutual workings, and to set forth more clearly the truth of the principles we have laid down.
We will consider first the history of that one among the prominent literary languages of the present day which has most recently attained its position, namely the German. From the earliest dawn of history, Germany has been filled with a multitude of more or less discordant dialects, each occupying its own limited territory, and no one of them better entitled than any other to set itself up as the norm of correct German speech. How far back their separation goes, it is impossible to tell; whence, when, and how the first Germanic tribe entered central Europe, that its tongue might become there the mother of so many languages, crowding Germany and Scandinavia, and spreading, through England, even to the shores and prairies of a new world; or whether the beginnings of dialectic division were made before the entrance of the race into its,present seats—these are secrets which will never be fully disclosed. There were sweeping changes in the range and character of the Germanic dialects during those ages of migration and strife when Germany and Rome were carrying on their life and death struggle. Whole branches of the German race, among them some of the most renowned and mighty, as the Goths and Vandals, wholly lost their existence as separate communities, being scattered and absorbed into other communities, and their languages also ceased to exist. Leagues and migrations, intestine struggles and foreign conquests, produced fusions and absorptions, extensions, contractions, and extinctions, in manifold variety; but without any tendency to a general unity: and three centuries and a half ago, when the modern German first put forth its claim to stand as the common language of Germany, there was in that country the same Babel of discordant speech as at the
