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I have fairly sustained my views against theirs, I am justified; and 

 on that basis I am perfectly willing to submit to judgment. 



I do not think Prof. Muller the person best qualified to judge 

 me fairly, because, in the first j^Iace, owing to his great fertility as a 

 writer, and his position as accepted guide and philosopher, beyond 

 any other living man, of the English-speaking people, I have felt 

 called upon to controvert his views oftener than those of any other 

 authority ; and yet more, in the second place, because he does not 

 appear to have qualified himself by carefully examining what I have 

 written. lie confesses to never having looked at my volume on lan- 

 guage until a few weeks ago, when stirred up to it by the fact that 

 my opinions had been quoted with approval in so conspicuous a quar- 

 ter as the pages of the Contemporary. And, even now, he has evi- 

 dently given it the most cursory examination. He has not observed 

 that it was printed and published in England, instead of "in Amer- 

 ica." He has not discovered that it is a " systematic " discussion of 

 its subject. He is mainly impressed, even to amusement, with its 

 similarity to his own work : as, indeed, resemblances at first glance 

 are always more striking than ditferences : if he will continue his 

 study, he will certainly find the likeness less and less apparent, and 

 extending almost only to those facts and principles which are uni- 

 versal property among philologists, neither he nor I having a patent- 

 right to them ; Avhile the underlying diflferences of view and plan will 

 become more and more conspicuous to him. And, most of all, he 

 j^icks out and sets forth certain alleged inconsistencies in a manner 

 which only great haste can explain and excuse, since every one of 

 them would be removed by a consideration of the place and connec- 

 tion of each passage quoted. He is even more than once so unlucky 

 as to select a passage as showing me to hold a certain view riglit out 

 of an argument in favor of the contrary view. For example (p. 310), 

 in citing my expression that the facts of language " are almost as little 

 the work of man as is the form of his skull," he overlooks the preced- 

 ing clauses of the same sentence : " So far as concerns the purposes 

 for which he [the linguistic scholar] studies them, and the results he 

 would derive from them." The whole being a part of a statement 

 intended to show that " the absence of reflection and conscious intent 

 takes away from the facts of language the subjective character that 

 would otherwise belong to them as products of volmitary action,'''' 

 There are several other cases quite as palpable as this : it is useless to 

 expose them here. 



I ought to be more than satisfied with the insignificant array of 

 trifling errors (or supposed errors) of detail in my volume, drawn up 

 by Prof. Muller on page 312 ; unfortunately, I could myself, if called 

 upon, furnish a much heavier list. I only notice one, as being an im- 

 portant evidence of the haste and cursoriness already referred to. 

 My critic is shocked to find " the Phoenician alphabet still spoken of as 



