298 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



amount of civilization as to enable him to frame some kind of record 

 of his own career, and take no account of the many ages which must 

 have transpired before he could have attained that power. Amonw 

 the many facts attesting the high antiquity of man, the formation of 

 language might be adduced, and his object was to give a few of the 

 most striking facts which it yields. Language was not innate, but ad- 

 ventitious. Infants were without language, and those born deaf were 

 always dumb, for without the sense of hearing there would have been 

 no language at all. Among the unquestionable proofs that language 

 was not innate, was the prodigious number of languages which existed, 

 some being of a very simple and others of a very complex character. 

 II' additional evidence were wanted that language was an adventitious 

 acquirement, it was found in this that a whole nation might lose its 

 original tongue, and in its stead adopt any foreign one. The language 

 that had been the vernacular of the Jews for three thousand years had 

 ceased to be so for two thousand years, and the descendants of those 

 who spoke it were now speaking an infinity of foreign tongues, Euro- 

 pean or Asiatic. Languages which were derived from a single tongue 

 of Italy had superseded the many native languages which were once 

 spoken in Spain, in France, and in Italy itself. A language of Ger- 

 man origin had nearly displaced not only all the native languages of 

 England and Ireland, but the numerous ones of a large portion of 

 America. Some eight millions of negroes were placed in the New 

 World whose forefathers spoke many African tongues. It necessarily 

 followed from this argument that when man first appeared on the 

 earth he was destitute of language, and each separate tribe of men 

 framing a separate one, hence the multitude of tongues. That the 

 framers were arrant savages, was proved by the fact that the rudest 

 tribes ever discovered had already completed the task of forming a 

 perfect language. The languages spoken by the grovelling savages of 

 Australia were so, and were even more artificial and complex in 

 structure than those of many people more advanced. The first rudi- 

 ments of language would consist of a few articulate sounds by which 

 to make known their wants and wishes ; and between that time and 

 their obtaining completeness, probably countless ages had passed, even 

 among the rudest tribes. In every department of language we find 

 evidence of the great antiquity of man. The Egyptians must have 

 attained a large measure of civilization before they had invented sym- 

 bolic or phonetic writing, and yet these were found on the most 

 ancient of their monuments. The invention of letters had been made 

 at many different points, extending from Italy to China a clear 

 proof that civilization had many independent sources ; but, such was 

 everywhere the antiquity of the invention, that we could hardly in 

 any case tell when or by whom it was made, though made in a hun- 

 dred separate places. Epochs or eras, depending, as they must 

 necessarily do, on the art of writing, were, of course, of still later 

 origin. They were all, indeed, of comparatively recent origin. The 

 Jews, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians had none at all ; the Greek 

 epoch dated only 776 and the Roman 753 before Christ. The old- 

 est epoch of the Hindus made the world, and of course man, up to 

 the present time, 3,872,960 years old. That was known to be a fable 

 spun from faithless brains. The oldest era of the same people that 



