the linguistic patrimony with which each branch commenced its separate history, and may still be seen among the stores of more recent acquisition. Any word which is found in the possession of all or nearly all the branches is, unless there be special reasons to the contrary, to be plausibly regarded as having formed part of their common inheritance from the time of their unity. A vocabulary constructed of words thus hunted out can be, indeed, but an imperfect one, since no one can tell what proportion of the primitive tongue may have become altogether lost, or changed by phonetic corruption past possibility of recognition, in the later dialects of so many branches that its true character is no longer discoverable: but, if the list be drawn up with due skill and care, it may be depended upon as far as it goes. And as, from the stock of words composing any existing or recorded language, we can directly draw important conclusions respecting the knowledge, circumstances, and manners of the people who speak it, so we can do the same thing with the fragment of Indo-European speech which we shall have thus set up. It is obvious, too, that the results of such an investigation must be more satisfactory, the more primitive and unlettered the people respecting which it is made, the more exclusively native in origin and restricted in scope their civilization. A language like our own is an immense encyclopedia, as it were, in which are laid away the cognitions and experiences of a whole world, and of numerous generations; it is as many-sided, as cosmopolitan, as hard to grasp and interpret in detail, as is our culture; while the tongue of a rude and isolated tribe—like the Fuegians, the Fijians, the Eskimos—would be a comparatively plain and legible portraiture of its condition and character.
Some of the main results of the investigation made by means of language into the primitive state of that tribe which spoke the mother-tongue of the Indo-European family have been long since drawn out, and are already become the commonplaces of ethnological science. The subject is far from being yet exhausted, and we may look forward to much greater confidence of conclusion and definiteness of detail, when all the languages of the family shall have been more
