the science of language, has established, and to see wherein they agree with that which has hitherto absorbed the chief share of our attention, and wherein they differ from it. Moreover, it is clear that we should not appreciate the peculiar character of the mode of communication and expression belonging to our family, we should not even know that it had a distinctive character of its own, that the problem of speech was not solved in an identical manner by all parts of the human race, if we did not look to see how the other families have constructed the fabric of their language. We shall, accordingly, devote the present lecture and the one next following to such an examination; making it, of course, much more brief and cursory than has been our examination of Indo-European language.
There was the more reason why we should draw out with some fullness of detail the recognized history of development of the language which has been most deeply studied and is most thoroughly understood by linguistic scholars, inasmuch as some of the main results thereby won have a universal value. Much of that which has been demonstrated to be true respecting Indo-European speech is to be accepted as true respecting all human speech. Not that its historical analysis has been everywhere made so complete as to yield in each case with independent certainty the same results which the study of this one family has yielded. But nothing has been found which is of force to prove the history of language otherwise than, in its most fundamental features, the same throughout the globe; while much has been elicited which favours its homogeneousness: enough, indeed, when taken in connection with the theoretical probabilities of the case, to make the conclusion a sufficiently certain one, that all the varied and complicated forms of speech which now fill the earth have been wrought into their present shape by a like process of gradual development; that all designation of relations is the result of growth; that formative elements have been universally elaborated out of independent words; that the historical germs of language everywhere are of the nature of those simple elements which we have called roots; moreover, that roots have generally, if
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