pose themselves to have proved already, by the evidence of language, that all mankind are akin by blood as well as by nature, will be conceded by many who are yet unwilling to give up all hope of seeing the proof one day satisfactorily made out. Let us, then, enter into a brief examination of the point, and a consideration of the grounds upon which is founded the view we have taken.
To show, in the first place, that linguistic science can never claim to prove the ultimate variety of human races will be no long or difficult task. That science, as we have seen, regards language as something which has grown up, in the manner of an institution, from weak and scanty beginnings; it is a development out of germs; it started with simple roots, brief in form and of indeterminate meaning, by the combination of which words came later into being. And the existing differences of speech among men are, at least to a very considerable extent, the result, not of original diversity, but of discordant growth. Now we cannot presume to set any limits to the extent to which languages once the same may have grown apart from one another. It matters not what opinion we may hold respecting the origin of the first germs of speech: if we suppose them to have been miraculously created and placed in the mouths of the first ancestors of men, their present differences would not justify us in believing that different sets must have been imparted to different pairs, or groups, of ancestors; for the same influences which have so obscured the common descent of English, Welsh, and Hindustani, for example, may, by an action more prolonged or more intense, have transformed germs originally common beyond even the faintest possibility of recognition. And if, on the other hand, we regard them as originated by the same agency which has brought about their later combinations and mutations, by men, namely, using legitimately and naturally the faculties with which they have been endowed, under the guidance of the instincts and impulses implanted in them—and no linguist, certainly, as such, has any right to deny at least the possibility of this origin of language—then the case is yet clearer. For we cannot venture to say how long a time the formation of
