io6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



which afterward became French ; and the French language is no more 

 Germanic than it is Celtic. Natural selection has caused the disap- 

 pearance of a considerable number of idioms. Languages which come 

 into conflict are like groups of animals that have to struggle with one 

 another for existence. They must gain upon their competitors, or re- 

 sign themselves to disappear before them. Just as, in the contest for 

 life and development, the best-armed races finally prevail over those 

 which are less favored, so languages which are best served by their 

 own aptitudes and by external circumstances prevail over those whose 

 evolutive force is less considerable, and over those which historical 

 conditions have less well prepared for the combat. In France, the 

 French, the ancient langue cVoil gradually supplanted the langue cVoc, 

 the Corsican, the Breton, the Flemish, and the Basque. In the British 

 Islands, English eclipsed the Celtic languages, Irish, Scotch, Manx, and 

 Gaelic, and will shortly have supplanted the Cornish. German has 

 overcome a number of Slavic idioms. 



Another kind of selection is going on within the language itself 

 with reference to the use of particular forms and words. In reference 

 to this, the study of dialects is of great interest. Dialects should not 

 be regarded as degenerate conditions of literary languages. These 

 languages are simply fortunate dialects, whose rival dialects have been 

 less favored. We are constantly meeting in dialects forms and words 

 which their sister literary languages have not preserved ; and this fact 

 gives dialects an important place in the study of the natural history of 

 language. 



The fact that some idioms have been lost has been disadvantageous 

 to linguistic studies because intermediate forms have thereby disap- 

 peared, the existence of which would have explained many living 

 forms. In this, again, we have presented in language something com- 

 parable to what has taken place among animals and plants. More- 

 over, a linguistic species, once extinct, can never be brought back to 

 life. It has been only a little while since the Tasmanians disappeared, 

 and their language with them. Those people who were the product 

 of a long ethnic evolution can never be brought back ; no more can a 

 language like theirs, which was also the product of a long develop- 

 ment, be revived. So in the world of animals and plants, the disap- 

 pearance of a species is always definitive ; to bring it back to a new 

 life would require the impossible return of the conditions of every 

 kind which had brought it up to the stage which it had reached at the 

 moment of its extinction. 



I should be satisfied if I could believe that this review, perhaps too 

 rapid, has made evident the interesting fact of the life and evolution 

 of languages. To say life of language does not seem sufficient, for 

 that word only gives the idea of a simple state of activity. The word 

 evolution is more rigorously exact. We find ourselves, in fact, in the 

 presence of successive developments of an entirely natural order. The 



