Thus asleep is on

a-falling stands for an original on. sleep, aright is onrihte, away is onweg, aback is onbæc, again is ongén (Ger. entgegen), among is ongemang, &c.

This must suffice as an illustration of the principles on which the Science of Language rests, viz. that what is real in modern formations must be admitted as possible in more ancient formations, and that what has been found to be true on a small scale may be true on a larger scale.

But the same illustration may also serve as a warning. There is much in the science of language to tempt us to overstep the legitimate limits of inductive reasoning. We may infer from the known to the unknown in language tentatively, but not positively. It does not follow, even within so small a sphere as the Aryan family of speech, that what is possible in

manifeste encore mieux si l'on y ajoute l'article, en disant eroria niz, c'est à dire, mot à mot, je suis tombé, ou celui qui est tombé.

Le futur erorico niz (je tomberai) offre le même verbe et la même forme passive avec la terminaison co, laquelle est propre à exprimer la futurition, par la vertu qu'elle a de signifier la destination à, pour. C'est dans ce même goût que l'on dit en espagnol, está por llegar (il est pour arriver).

Notre futur s'exprime encore par la désinence en, comme jaikeren niz (je me leverai), joanen niz (j'irai). Pour comprendre que cette formule n'exprime le futur que par une valeur empruntée de la déclinaison, il suffit d'observer que le cas destinatif aitarentçat, aitarendaco (pour le père), amarentçat, amarendaco (pour la mère), s'abrége quelquefois en cette manière, aitaren, amaren, &c. Cette observation faite, l'on comprend aisément que la double formule dont il s'agit n'est synonyme en cet endroit que parcequ'elle l'est aussi dans la déclinaison.

Tout ce que nous avons dit des infinitifs combinés avec le verbe niz, se vérifie également dans leur combinaison avec le verbe dut; ainsi ikhusten dut, pour ikhustean dut, répond littéralement au mauvais latin habeo in videre; ikhusi dut serait habeo visum; ikhusico dut, ou ikhusiren dut, habeo videndum.

French is possible in Latin, that what explains Bengali will explain Sanskrit; nay, the similarity between some of the Aryan languages and the Bask in the formation of their participles should be considered as an entirely exceptional case. Mr. Garnett, however, after establishing the principle that the participle present may be expressed by the locative of a verbal noun, endeavours in his excellent paper to show that the original Indo-European participle, the Latin amans, the Greek týptōn, the Sanskrit bodhat, were formed on the same principle:-that they are all inflected cases of a verbal noun. In this, I believe, he has failed,* as many have failed before and after him, by imagining that what has been found to be true in one portion of the vast kingdom of speech must be equally true in all. This is not so, and cannot be so. Language, though its growth is governed by intelligible principles throughout, was not so uniform in its progress as to repeat exactly the same phenomena at every stage of its life. As the geologist looks for different characteristics when he has to deal with London clay, with Oxford clay, or with old red sandstone, the student of language, too, must be prepared for different formations, even though he confines himself to one stage in the history of language, the inflectional. And if he steps beyond this, the most modern stage, then to apply indiscriminately to the lower stages of human speech, to the agglutinative and radical, the same tests which have proved successful in the in

*He takes the Sanskrit dravat as a possible ablative, likewise sas-at, and tan-vat (sic). It would be impossible to form ablatives in at (as) from verbal bases raised by the vikaranas of the special tenses, nor would the ablative be so appropriate a case as the locative, for taking the place of a verbal adjective.

DIFFERENT TREATMENT OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. 25

flectional, would be like ignoring the difference between aqueous, igneous, and metamorphic rocks. There are scholars who, as it would seem, are incapable of appreciating more than one kind of evidence. No doubt the evidence on which the relationship of French and Italian, of Greek and Latin, of Lithuanian and Sanskrit, of Hebrew and Arabic, has been established, is the most satisfactory; but such evidence is possible only in inflectional languages that have passed their period of growth, and have entered into the stage of phonetic decay. To call for the same evidence in support of the homogeneousness of the Turanian languages, is to call for evidence which, from the nature of the case, it is impossible to supply. As well might the geologist look for fossils in granite! The Turanian languages allow of no grammatical petrifactions like those on which the relationship of the Aryan and Semitic families is chiefly founded. If they did, they would cease to be what they are; they would be inflectional, not agglutinative.

If languages were all of one and the same texture, they might be unravelled, no doubt, with the same tools. But as they are not-and this is admitted by all-it is surely mere waste of valuable time to test the relationship of Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, and Finnic dialects by the same criteria on which the common descent of Greek and Latin is established; or to try to discover Sanskrit in the Malay dialects, or Greek in the idioms of the Caucasian mountaineers. The whole crust of the earth' is not made of lias, swarming with Ammonites and Plesiosauri, nor is all language made of Sanskrit, teeming with Supines and Paulo-pluperfects. Up to a certain point the method by which so great results

have been achieved in classifying the Aryan languages may be applicable to other clusters of speech. Phonetic laws are always useful, but they are not the only tools which the student of language must learn to handle. If we compare the extreme members of the Polynesian dialects, we find but little agreement

in what may be called their grammar, and many of

their words seem totally distinct. But if we compare their numerals we clearly see that these are common property; we perceive similarity, though at the same time great diversity *:

We begin to note the phonetic changes that have taken place in one and the same numeral, as pronounced by different islanders; we thus arrive at

Hale, United States Exploring Expedition, vol. vii. p. 246.

phonetic laws, and these, in their turn, remove the apparent dissimilarity in other words which at first seemed totally irreconcilable. Let those who are inclined to speak disparagingly of the strict observance of phonetic rules in tracing the history of Aryan words, and who consider it mere pedantry to be restrained by Grimm's Law from identifying such words as Latin cura and care, Greek kalên and to call, Latin peto and to bid, Latin corvus and crow, look to the progress that has been made by African and Polynesian philologists in checking the wild spirit of etymology even where they have to deal with dialects never reduced as yet to a fixed standard by the influence of a national literature, never written down at all, and never analysed before by grammatical science. The whole of the first volume of Dr. Bleek's 'Comparative Grammar of the South African Languages' treats of Phonology, of the vowels and consonants peculiar to each dialect, and of the changes to which each letter is liable in its passage from one dialect into another (see page 82, seq.). And Mr. Hale, in the seventh volume of the United States Exploring Expedition' (p. 232), has not only given a table of the regular changes which words common to the numerous Polynesian languages undergo, but he has likewise. noted those permutations which take place occasionally only. On the strength of these phonetic laws once established, words which have hardly one single letter in common have been traced back with perfect certainty to one and the same source.

6

But mere phonetic decay will not account for the differences between the Polynesian dialects, and unless we admit the process of dialectic regeneration to a much greater extent than we should be justified in doing in