less unlike than two others that may be chosen from the same race. While, on the contrary, words and phrases taken down from the lips of an individual, or written or engraved by one hand, can be no private possession; they must belong to a whole community.
The superior capacity of the remains of language to cast light upon the affinities of races needs only to be illustrated by an instance or two. What could have impregnably established the ethnological position of the ancient Persians like the decipherment of the inscriptions of Darius and his successors, which show that they spoke a dialect so nearly akin with those of Bactria and India that it can be read by the latter's aid? What could exhibit the intimate mixture of races and cultures in the valley of the Euphrates and Tigris, and the presence there of an important element which was neither Indo-European nor Semitic, except the trilingual inscriptions of the Mesopotamian monuments? What a pregnant fact in African ethnology will be, if fully and irrefragably proved, the relationship of the Hottentot dialects with the ancient Egyptian! What but the preserved fragments of their speech could have taught us that the Etruscans had no kindred with any other of the known races inhabiting Europe? And when would physical science ever have made the discovery that the same thing is true of the Basques, whom yet it has all the opportunity which it could desire to study? But the most important of the advantages belonging to linguistic science, in its relation to ethnology, is that to which allusion was made at the very outset of our discussions: namely, that language tells so much more respecting races than lies within the reach or scope of the physicist. In every part and particle, it is instinct with history. It is a picture of the internal life of the community to which it belongs; in it their capacities are exhibited, their characters expressed; it reflects their outward circumstances, records their experiences, indicates the grade of knowledge they have attained, exhibits their manners and institutions. Being itself an institution, shaped by their consenting though only half-conscious action, it is an important test of national endowment and disposition, like
