north-western Greece, is still in the same position; linguistic scholars are divided in opinion as to whether it is yet proved to be Indo-European, though with a growing preponderance upon the affirmative side. Examples of excessive and effacing differentiation are not wanting in existing speech. There are now spoken among barbarous peoples in different parts of the world—as on some of the islands of the Pacific, among the African tribes, and the aborigines of this continent—dialects in which the processes of linguistic change, the destruction and reconstruction of words and forms, are going on at a rate so abnormally rapid, that a dialect, it is said, becomes unintelligible in a generation or two; and in a few centuries all material trace of affinity between idioms of common descent may become blotted out. Such exceptional cases do not take away the value of the genetic method of investigation, nor derogate from the general certainty of its results in the classification of languages. But they do cause the introduction, cautiously and to a limited extent, of another indication of probable relationship: namely, concordance in the general method of solution of the linguistic problem. It is found that the great families of related languages differ from one another, not only in the linguistic material which they employ, in the combinations of sounds out of which, back to the remotest traceable beginning, they make their radical and formative elements, and designate given meanings and relations, but also, and often to no small degree, in their way of managing their material; in their apprehension of the relations of ideas which are to be expressed by the combination of elements, and in the method in which they apply the resources they possess to the expression of relations: they differ in the style, as well as the substance, of their grammatical structure. It is evident that the style may be so peculiar and characteristic as to constitute valid evidence of family relationship, even where the substance has been altered by variation and substitution till it presents no trustworthy coincidences. We shall have occasion to note and examine, farther on, some of the cases in which reliance is placed upon morphological correspondences, as they are called, upon correspondences of structural
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