linguistic facts: these are so inextricably intertwined with historical facts, so dependent upon and developed out of them, that the two cannot be separated in consideration and treatment; one chief department of the value of the science lies in its capacity to throw light upon the history of human races. The importance of the Indo-European races in history is, then, legitimately to be included among the titles of Indo-European philology to the first attention of the linguistic scholar. Moreover, since the relation between the capacity of a race and the character of the tongue originated and elaborated by that race is a direct and necessary one, it could not but be the case that the speech of the most eminently and harmoniously endowed part of mankind should itself be of highest character and most harmonious development, and so the most worthy object of study, in its structure and its relations to mind and thought. And this advantage also, as we shall see more plainly hereafter, is in fact found to belong to Indo-European language: in the classification of all human speech it takes, unchallenged, the foremost rank.
But these considerations, weighty as they are, do not fully explain the specially intimate bond subsisting between general linguistic science and the study of Indo-European speech. Not only did the establishment of the unity of that family, and the determination of the relations of its members, constitute the most brilliant achievement of the new science; they were also its foundation; it began with the recognition of these truths, and has developed with their elaboration. The reason is not difficult to discover: Indo-European language alone furnished such a grand body of related facts as the science needed for a sure basis. Its dialects have a range, in the variety of their forms and in the length of the period of development covered by them, which is sought elsewhere in vain. They illustrate the processes of linguistic growth upon an unrivalled scale, and from a primitive era to which we can make but an imperfect approach among the other languages of mankind. Portions of the Chinese literature, it is true, are nearly or quite as old as anything Indo-European, and the Chinese language,
