significant of those ideas without whose designation no spoken tongue would be worthy of the name. If we could possibly suppose that the rude ancestors of the Indo-European nations, more brutish than the Africans and Polynesians of the present day, were unable to count their fingers even until taught by some missionary tribe which went from one to the other, scattering these first rudiments of mathematical knowledge, we might attribute to its influence the close correspondence of the Indo-European numeral systems; but then we should have farther to assume that the same teachers instructed them how to address one another with I and thou, and how to name the members of their own families: and who will think of maintaining such an absurdity? All the preponderating influence of the Sanskrit-speaking tribes of northern India over the ruder population of the Dekhan, to which they gave religion, philosophy, and polity, has only resulted in filling the tongues of the south with learned Sanskrit, much as our own English is filled with learned Latin and Greek. Even that coalescence of nearly equal populations, languages, and cultures out of which has grown the tongue we speak, has, as was pointed out in the fourth of these lectures, left the language of common life among us—the nucleus of a vocabulary which the child first learns, and every English speaker uses every day, almost every hour—still overwhelmingly Saxon: the English is Germanic in its fundamental structure, though built higher and decorated in every part with Romanic material. So is it also with the Persian, in its relation to the Arabic, of whose material its more learned and artificial styles are in great part made up; so with the Turkish, of which the same thing is true with regard to the Persian and Arabic. But most of all do these cases of the mingling of different tongues in one language, and every other known case of a like character, show that the grammatical system, the apparatus of inflection and word-making, the means by which vocables, such as they stand in their order in the dictionary, are taken out and woven together into connected discourse, resists longest and most obstinately any trace of intermixture, the intrusion of foreign elements and foreign habits. However many French
