250 EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 



such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a 

 burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their 

 children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The 

 infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while 

 others can just master a whole sentence, and those still further 

 advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, 

 through the live-long day, become habituated to a language of 

 their own. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, 

 and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect composed 

 of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without 

 rule, and in the course of a generation the entire character of the 

 language 'is changed." 1 It has been stated, that in like manner 

 the children of the Manchester factory workers, left for a great 

 part of the day, in large assemblages, under the care of perhaps 

 a single elderly person, and spending the time in amusements, 

 make a great deal of new language. I have seen children in 

 other circumstances amuse themselves by concocting and throw- 

 ing into the family circulation entirely new words ; and I 

 believe I am running little risk of contradiction when I say 

 that there is scarcely a family, even amongst the middle classes 

 of this country, who have not some peculiarities of pronuncia- 

 tion and syntax, which have originated amongst themselves, it 

 is hardly possible to say how. All these things being con- 

 sidered, it is easy to understand how mankind have come at 

 length to possess between three and four thousand languages, 

 all different at least as much as French, German, and English, 

 though, as has been shown, resemblances suggesting commu- 

 nity of origin are observable in groups of them. 



What has been said on the question whether mankind were 

 originally in a state of civilization or otherwise, will have pre- 

 pared the reader for understanding how the arts and sciences, 

 and the rudiments of civilization itself, took their rise amongst 



7 ^j 



men. The only source of fallacious views on this subject is 

 the so frequent observation of arts, sciences, and social modes, 

 forms, and ideas, being not indigenous where we see them 

 now nourishing, but known to have been derived elsewhere : 

 thus Koine borrowed from Greece, Greece from Egypt, and 

 Egypt itself, lost in the mists of historic antiquity, is now 

 supposed to have obtained the light of knowledge from some 

 still earKer scene of intellectual culture. This has caused to 

 many a great difficulty in supposing a natural or spontaneous 



1 Missionary Scenes and Labours in Southern Africa. 



