HUMAN SPEECH 49 



were in a position to prove that all known forms of speech could be 

 classified into a single linguistic stock, the apparent parallel above re- 

 ferred to between linguistic and biological reconstruction would be a 

 genuine one. As it is, we must content ourselves with operating with 

 distinct and, as far as we can tell, genetically unrelated linguistic 

 stocks. The documentary evidence and the reconstructive evidence 

 gained by comparison enable us to reduce the bewildering mass of 

 known languages to a far smaller number of such larger stock groups, 

 yet the absolute number of these latter groups still remains disquiet- 

 ingly large. The distribution of linguistic stocks presents great irreg- 

 ularities. In Europe there are only three such represented : the 

 Indogermanic or Aryan, which embraces nearly all the better known lan- 

 guages of the continent ; the Ural-Altaic, the best known representatives 

 of which are Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish; and the Basque of 

 southwestern France and northern Spain. On the other hand, that 

 part of aboriginal North America which lies north of Mexico alone 

 embraces fifty or more distinct linguistic stocks. Some stocks, as, for 

 instance, the Indogermanic just referred to and the Algonkin of North 

 America, are spread over vast areas and include many peoples or tribes of 

 varying cultures ; others, such as the Basque and many of the aboriginal 

 stocks of California, occupy surprisingly small territories. It is pos- 

 sible to adopt one of two attitudes towards this phenomenon of the 

 multiplicity of the largest known genetic speech aggregates. On the 

 one hand one may assume that the disintegrating effects of gradual 

 linguistic change have in many cases produced such widely differing 

 forms of speech as to make their comparison for reconstructive pur- 

 poses of no avail, in other words, that what appear to us to-day to be 

 independent linguistic stocks appear such not because they are in fact 

 historically unrelated, but merely because the evidence of such his- 

 torical connection has been so obscured by time as to be practically 

 lost. On the other hand, one may prefer to see in the existence of 

 mutually independent linguistic stocks evidence of the independent 

 beginnings and development of human speech at different times and 

 places in the course of the remote history of mankind; there is every 

 reason to believe that in a similar manner many religious concepts and 

 other forms of human thought and activity found widely distributed 

 in time and place have had multiple origins, yet more or less paral- 

 lel developments. It is naturally fruitless to attempt to decide be- 

 tween the monogenetic and polygenetic standpoints here briefly out- 

 lined. All that a conservative student will care to do is to shrug his 

 shoulders and to say, " Thus far we can go and no further." It 

 should be said, however, that more intensive study of linguistic data 

 is from time to time connecting stocks that had hitherto been looked 

 upon as unrelated. Yet it can hardly be expected that serious research 

 will ever succeed in reducing the present Babel to a pristine unity. 



VOL. LXXIX. -4. 



