acter presented by the Indo-European languages, a distinction originally euphonic, and afterwards made significant. We can point out the influences which have made men the plural of man, led the preterit of lead; we can trace back set and sang to forms in which their distinction from sit and sing was conveyed by formative elements added from without to the root; but no historical researches bring the Semitic scholar to, or even perceptibly toward, any such explanation of the forms he is studying. Now and then a kind of symbolism is pretty distinctly traceable: the weaker vowels i and u sometimes convey by their use an intimation of less active or transitive meaning, as compared with the strong full a: thus, the act of 'killing' is expressed by qatala, but the conditions of 'being sorry,' of 'being beautiful,' by 'hazina, 'hasuna; and especially, every active verb, like qatala, has its corresponding passive qutila. But such considerations can explain only a small portion of the derivatives from Semitic roots; the genesis of the rest is an unsolved problem, of extremest difficulty. The triplicity of radical consonants is an equally primitive characteristic of all the Semitic tongues, yet there are not wanting certain apparent indications that it is the result of historical development. To make out the required number of three, some roots contain the same consonant doubled; in others, one of the three is a weak or servile letter, hardly more than a hiatus, or it is a semivowel which seems to have been developed out of an original vowel; further, there are groups of roots of somewhat kindred signification which agree in two of their consonants, so that the third is plausibly conjectured to be an introduced letter, having the effect to differentiate a general meaning once conveyed by the other two alone. Guided by such signs, and urged on by the presumed necessity in theory for regarding triliterality as not absolutely original, scholars have repeatedly made the attempt to reduce these roots to an earlier and simpler condition, out of which they should be accounted a historic growth—but hitherto with only indifferent success; we are yet far from attaining any satisfactory understanding of the beginnings of Semitic speech. It is suggested with much plausibility that the universality of the
