54o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



spoke, afford by comparison but miserable accommodation for thought. 

 From our extremely small experience of the speech of the world we 

 judge that, in the case of the few languages which we know, evolution 

 has proceeded backwards : the better organized, and therefore, from the 

 evolutionary standpoint, V\s higher, language has given place to the 

 lower. But we are not justified in this conclusion. Language is 

 essentially labile. The solvent of thought changes as the quality of 

 thought changes. Philologists can but speculate as to the stages 

 through which Greek acquired its complexity. Demosthenes did not 

 help to regularize a single inflexion. He used the instrument of 

 expression as it came to his hand. His language is not more, but less, 

 ornate than that of Homer. 



Greek and Latin were not made by cultured Greeks and Eomans. 

 The languages took form in the converse of their illiterate ancestors. 

 Literature, upon which the beginnings of culture rest, closes language- 

 building in the larger sense. Zulu is a more highly flexional language 

 than Greek, with more elaborate endings, expressive of gender, number, 

 case, mood, voice; with nicer laws of euphony. Probably the ancestors 

 of the Greeks were, like the Zulus, a loquacious, quarrelsome, rhetorical 

 race. The language of the Zulus is not great because it is complex in 

 form. Every language becomes great when greatly used — Greek from 

 Demosthenes's mouth; English from Milton's pen. The test of the 

 elevation of a language, from the evolutionary point of view, is its 

 simplicity, freedom from ambiguity, correspondence in the order in 

 which words are used with the sequence in which ideas successively 

 occupy the focus of consciousness. ' Amdbo, love, future, 1/ is as swift 

 an expression of thought as ' I shall love ' ; although it does not place 

 the constituents of the idea in the order in which they pass across 

 the mirror of my mind; my personality, in the case of such a general 

 proposition, takes the lead. 'Lucretiam amabo,' no doubt, gives the 

 order aright. But neither conglomerate allows of the inversion ' Shall 

 I love ? ' Picking up the school-book nearest to hand, I have essayed 

 the ' sors Virgiliana.' This is the sentence which my finger touched : 

 " Kelinquit animus Sextium gravibus acceptis vulneribus " (' De Bello 

 Gallico/ VI.). It seems to me incredible that this sentence expresses 

 the thought as it formed itself in Caesar's mind : " Leaves it the soul 

 Sextius by or to grave by or to received by or to wounds." Surely the 

 idea of the personality of Sextius preceded the idea of some one 

 fainting? What purpose is served by three times explaining that it 

 was by or to (leaving it at the end an open question which) wounds ? 

 i -ibus/ if it does not impress the mind of the reader as the really 

 important constituent of the phrase, is unduly heavy for a mere in- 

 flexion. Caesar did his best with the language which his unlettered 

 ancestors had bequeathed to him; but he was to be pitied in that his 

 thoughts when they went abroad must walk in irons. 



