338 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



The Professor then directed attention to language as one of 

 the sources from which facts concerning man's history are to be 

 derived. " It is," he said, " needless for me to dwell on the value 

 of language as affording perhaps the best and safest clue to 

 ethnological affinities ; nor need I do more than allude to the 

 proofs of the antiquity of man afforded by the variations of 

 modern languages from their parent stock, variations which 

 are so great that some languages of common descent have now 

 hardly a dozen words in comm/m, and which must have required 

 an enormous lapse of time for their production ; and yet the main 

 features of which we find already established some 2,000 or 3,000 

 years ago. But even in minor details the evidence of language 

 may prove of immense service, though such has been the nature 

 and extent of the changes it has undergone, and so few are the 

 monuments of some of its phases, that there is often much diffi- 

 culty in extracting satisfactory testimony upon any given point. 

 When we consider the essentially persistent nature of language, 

 its continuity from generation to generation, each introducing but 

 few intentional changes, and each believing that it speaks what 

 is happily termed its mother tongue, we might, in the absence of 

 other evidence, find a difficulty in accepting the bare possibility 

 of such extensive modifications as it has undergone. But lan- 

 guage, and especially unwritten language, is curiously plastic ; 

 and all changes in manners and customs, and in the appliances of 

 life, must of necessity influence the methods of expression . "When 

 new discoveries are made, or new appliances introduced, new 

 terms also come in ; but these, like the inventions and objects 

 themselves, are always more or less connected with something 

 that has gone before. In process of time, these terms, which origi- 

 nally bore a distinct meaning in themselves, may become slightly 

 changed in form and even in their application, so that all traces 

 of their first derivation may be lost or partially concealed. But 

 what an amount of history is there crystallized in words, and 

 what aid would be afforded in unravelling the tangled clue 

 which guides us along the course of human progress, were we 

 able to trace only each substantive to its origin, and fix its age 

 and native place ! " 



The Professor next referred to .another and fruitful field of 

 observation, --the ground beneath us, and in the course of his 

 remarks said : 



1 ' It is impossible in any way to foresee what other discoveries 

 the strata beneath us may have y.et in store for us ; but certainly 

 there is no reason to conclude that we have as yet found the 

 earliest traces of man upon the earth, or even on the soil of West- 

 ern Europe. At the same time I must confess that the present 

 amount of evidence of human existence in Pliocene, and even in 

 Miocene, times in France, appears to me, after a careful exami- 

 nation of it on the spot, to be very far from convincing. Should 

 the remains of Miocene man be eventually discovered, it will be 

 of the highest interest to compare his form with that of his con- 

 temporary and equal in stature, the Dryopithecus, which was 

 sufficiently human in habit to retain its wisdom-tooth still unde- 



