XXVI 



EVOLUTION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 



BY P. GILES, M.A., LL.D. (Aberdeen), 



Reader in Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge. 



IN no study has the historical method had a more salutary in- 

 fluence than in the Science of Language. Even the earliest records 

 show that the meaning of the names of persons, places, and common 

 objects was then, as it has always been since, a matter of interest to 

 mankind. And in every age the common man has regarded himself 

 as competent without special training to explain by inspection (if one 

 may use a mathematical phrase) the meaning of any words that 

 attracted his attention. Out of this amateur etymologising has 

 sprung a great amount of false history, a kind of historical mythology 

 invented to explain familiar names. A single example will illustrate 

 the tendency. According to the local legend the ancestor of the 

 Earl of Erroll a husbandman who stayed the flight of his country- 

 men in the battle of Luncarty and won the victory over the Danes 

 by the help of the yoke of his oxen exhausted with the fray 

 uttered the exclamation Hoch heigh ! The grateful king about 

 to ennoble the victorious ploughman at once replied : 



Hoch heigh ! said ye 

 And Hay shall ye be. 



The Norman origin of the name Hay is well-known, and the battle of 

 Luncarty long preceded the appearance of Normans in Scotland, but 

 the legend nevertheless persists. 



Though the earliest European treatise on philological questions 

 which is now extant the Cratylus of Plato, as might be expected 

 from its authorship, contains some acute thinking and some shrewd 

 guesses, yet the work as a whole is infantine in its handling of 

 language, and it has been doubted whether Plato was more than 

 half serious in some of the suggestions which he puts forward 1 . In 



1 For an account of the Cratylus with references to other literature see Sandys' History 

 of Classical Scholarship, i. p. 92 ff., Cambridge, 1903. 



