geology, it is, perhaps for that very reason, all the more fascinating. It is a young and a growing science, that puts forth new strength with every year, that opens new prospects, new fields of enterprise on every side, and rewards its students with richer harvests than could be expected from the exhausted soil of the older sciences. The whole world is open, as it were, to the student of language. There is virgin soil close to our door, and there are whole continents still to conquer if we step beyond the frontiers of the ancient seats of civilisation. We may select a small village in our neighbourhood to pick up dialectic varieties and to collect phrases, proverbs, and stories which will disclose fragments, almost ground to dust, it is true, yet undeniable fragments of the earliest formations of Saxon speech and Saxon thought.* Or we may proceed to our very antipodes, and study the idiom of the Hawaian islanders, and watch in the laws and edicts of Kaméhaméha the working of the same human faculty of speech which, even in its most primitive efforts, never seems to miss the high end at which it aims. The dialects of Ancient Greece, ransacked as they have been by classical scholars, such as Maittaire, Giese, and Ahrens, will amply reward a fresh battue of the comparative philologist. Their forms, which * A valuable essay 'On some leading Characteristics of the Dialects spoken in the six Northern Counties of England, or Ancient Northumbria, and on the Variations in their Grammar from that of Standard English,' has lately been published by Mr. R. P. Peacock, Berlin, 1863. It is chiefly based on the versions of the Song of Solomon into many of the spoken dialects of England, which have of late years been executed and published under the auspices of H.I.H. Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte. It is to be hoped that the writer will continue his researches in a field of scholarship so full of promise. to the classical scholar were mere anomalies and curiosities, will thus assume a different aspect. They will range themselves under more general laws, and after receiving light by a comparison with other dialects, they will, in turn, reflect that light with increased power on the phonetic peculiarities of Sanskrit and Prâkrit, Zend and Persian, Latin and French. But even were the old mines exhausted, the Science of Language would create its own materials, and as with the rod of the prophet smite the rocks of the desert to call forth from them new streams of living speech. The rock inscriptions of Persia show what can be achieved by our science. I do not wonder that the discoveries due to the genius and the persevering industry of Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and last, not least, of Rawlinson, should seem incredible to those who only glance at them from a distance. Their incredulity will hereafter prove the greatest compliment that could have been paid to these eminent scholars.* * A thoroughly scholar-like answer to the late Sir G. C. Lewis's attacks on Champollion and other decipherers of ancient inscriptions may be seen in an article by Professor Le Page Renouf, Sir G. C. Lewis on the Decipherment and Interpretation of Dead Languages,' in the Atlantis, nos. vii. and viii., p. 23. Though it cannot be known now whether the late Sir G. C. Lewis ever modified his opinions as to the soundness of the method through which the inscriptions of Egypt, Persia, India, and ancient Italy have been deciphered, such was the uprightness of his character that he would certainly have been the first to acknowledge his mistake, had he been spared to continue his studies. Though his scepticism was occasionally uncritical and unfair, his loss is a severe loss to our studies, which, more than any others, require to be kept in order by the watchful eye and uncompromising criticism of close reasoners and sound scholars. An essay just published by Professor F. W. Newman, 'On the B 2 |