48 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



chasm between the two, and particularly if it is possible to compare 

 them in the form in which they existed in earlier periods, this sus- 

 picion of a common origin may be raised to a practical certainty. 

 Thus, direct comparison of Russian and German would certainly yield 

 enough lexical and grammatical similarities to justify one in suspect- 

 ing them to have diverged from a common source; the proof of such 

 genetic relationship, however, can not be considered quite satisfactory 

 until the oldest forms of German speech and Germanic speech generally 

 have been compared with the oldest forms of Slavic speech and until both 

 of these have been further compared with other forms of speech, such 

 as Latin and Greek, that there is reason to believe they are genetically 

 related to. When such extensive, not infrequently difficult, comparisons 

 have been effected, complete evidence may often be obtained of what 

 in the first instance would have been merely suspected. If all the forms 

 of speech that can be shown to be genetically related are taken to- 

 gether and carefully compared among themselves, it is obvious that 

 much information will be inferred as to their earlier undocumented 

 history; in favorable cases much of the hypothetical form of speech 

 from which the available forms have diverged may be reconstructed 

 with a considerable degree of certainty or plausibility. If under the 

 term history of English we include not only documented but such re- 

 constructed history as has been referred to, we can say that at least in 

 main outline it is possible to trace the development of our language 

 back from the present day to a period antedating at any rate 1500 B.C. 

 It is important to note that, though the English of to-day bears only 

 a faint resemblance to the hypothetical reconstructed Indogermanic 

 speech of say 1500 B.C., there could never have been a moment from 

 that time to the present when the continuity of the language was 

 broken. From our present standpoint that bygone speech of 1500 B.C. 

 was as much English as it was Greek or Sanskrit. The history of the 

 modern English words foot and its plural feet will illustrate both the 

 vast difference between the two forms of speech at either end of the 

 series and the gradual character of the changes that have taken place 

 within the series. Without here going into the actual evidence on 

 which the reconstructions are based, I shall merely list the various 

 forms which each word has had in the course of its history. Starting, 

 then, with foot — feet, and gradually going back in time, we have 

 flit — fit, fot — fet, fot — fete, fot — fbte, fot — f'oti, fot — foti, fot — fotir, 

 fot — fotiz, fot — fotis, fot — fates, fod — fades, and finally pod — podes, 

 beyond which our evidence does not allow us to go ; the last forms find 

 their reflex in Sanskrit pad — pddas. 



All languages that can be shown to be genetically related, that is, 

 to have sprung from a common source, form a historic unit to which 

 the term linguistic stock or linguistic family is applied. If, now, we 



