150 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



his paiud an instrument to work with, and be to the race an indispen- 

 sable help forward in the career of improvement, is to do him a great 

 deal more than justice. This is the way in which in general the pow- 

 ers of man have been drawn out and educated ; the art of writing 

 came, in like manner, from attempts at another kind of communica- 

 tion ; machines came, one item after another, in the struggle of man 

 to supply his physical needs. We are short-sighted beings, and never 

 able to look more than one step ahead, but we have the power of put- 

 ting each new step beyond its predecessor, and are surprised by-and- 

 by to see how far we have come, how much we have attained that we 

 had neither expected nor foreseen. 



If these views as to language are true, then the marked analogies 

 of languages with institutions are patent and undeniable. A language 

 is a body of usages ; it has its main occasion and usefulness in connec- 

 tion with the social life of a community ; it is a constituent part of the 

 civilization of its community, worked out, like the rest, by long-con- 

 tinued collision and friction between man and his circumstances, grad- 

 ually accumulated by the contributions of each member of a race 

 through successive generations, and handed down by a process of 

 teaching and learning. Let a child of European parents be brought 

 at birth into an Indian wigwam, and grow up among Indians only ; 

 and his life in all its parts will be Indian his food, his occupations, 

 his amusements, his knowledge, and his beliefs and, along with the 

 rest, his language also ; while the African, for instance, born and bred 

 in an American community, shows in all these same respects accord- 

 ance with that particular class of Americans among whom his lot is 

 cast. This by no means implies that there are no such things as race- 

 diiferences of capacity and disposition, even as there are wide individ- 

 ual differences between members of the same race : the white man 

 makes, perhaps, a somewhat peculiar kind of Indian, the African a 

 peculiar kind of American ; yet each acquires the civilization, lan- 

 guage included, of the race with which he grows up, and shows his 

 race-characteristics, as they their individual characteristics, inside of 

 that. 



All names are imperfect, and have their unsuitable, as well as 

 their suitable suggestiveness in connection with every new object to 

 which they are applied ; but I hold, and with the utmost confidence, 

 that there is no general name so truly descriptive of a language as 

 institution none which takes into account so many of its essential 

 characteristics, or marks so distinctly its place among the possessions 

 of its community. The word, no doubt, offends some, and seems to 

 others derogatory to the dignity of its subject ; but I believe that the 

 more the real nature and office of language are understood, and the 

 more established and consistent the linguistic views of the educated 

 become, the more its truth will be acknowledged. I have used it 

 often, partly in a kind of defiance to those views which are decidedly 



