i 5 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be sure, had touched upon certain aspects of the subject. And what 

 did Shakespeare know of the philology of English ? It is a common 

 saying that Shakespeare knew everything, and indeed he knew the 

 human mind so well that he easily divined its possibilities, not simply 

 beyond his own positive knowledge, but beyond the positive attain- 

 ments of the race, the head-light of his genius having thrown a blaze 

 along the track of human progress to the other side of stations that 

 the imperial train has been generations in approaching and which it 

 has not yet passed ; but intuition, though divine, can not do much % 

 with the hidden roots of a language, which call for the grub-axe of 

 the grammarian rather than for the scimetar of the poet, and it is not 

 too much to say that the man who knew everything knew next to 

 nothing of philology. Other instances need not be adduced. To 

 back these would be to gild refined gold. 



Not only is our mother-tongue, then, the instrument of our culture, 

 but the way to master it is to study it, in lieu of any foreign tongue, 

 living or dead. For English-speaking people the "special-culture 

 study " is not Latin and Greek or either, but English. The mother- 

 tongue, if I may recur to the botanical figure, is the tap-root of the 

 tree of mind, whereof no other tongue can be more than a rootlet. 

 Neglect it, and you dwarf the intellect ; cherish it, and the intellect 

 shoots up into full stature. Our mother-tongue is the source of our 

 mental growth. The time-worn notion opposed to this not only is 

 false, but its falsity is susceptible of demonstration in the strict sense 

 of the term. 



A curious question remains : How is it that a notion so contrary 

 to reason and experience has dominated the world for century after 

 century ? Of course, there is a cause for this effect. What is it ? At 

 the bottom or near the bottom of our mental nature lies a propensity 

 which, as related to the intellect, is called imitativeness, and, as related 

 to the will, may be called sequaciousness. It is, we all have reason to 

 know, an active agent in the formation of whatever we become the 

 shuttle, if I may so call it, of the loom of man, shooting its double 

 thread back and forth through the warp of his existence. If some 

 order of superior beings, capable by hypothesis of anything, should 

 take it into their heads to strike a medal expressive in a general way 

 of their sense of human character, and drop it from the clouds, it 

 would probably bear the image of a monkey on the obverse face, and 

 on the reverse that of a sheep ; and we should all have to acknowledge, 

 with such grace as we could muster, the palpable hit of our celestial 

 satirists. Certain it is that, when we see a thing done by somebody 

 else in the line of our aspirations, we incline to do it ourselves, and to 

 keep on doing it, until some other body, of higher skill or greater 

 force, does some other thing in the same line. The flock follows the 

 first sheep that jumps, and jumps to bis jumps, till he jumps no more, 

 or is overjumped by another. This is the general movement, subject 



