3 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This sacred theory entered the seventeenth centnry in full 

 force, and seems to have swept everything before it. The great 

 commentators, Catholic and Protestant, accepted and developed 

 it. Great prelates, Catholic and Protestant, stood guard over it, 

 favoring those who supported it, doing their best to destroy those 

 who would modify it. 



In 1606 Stephen Guichard built new buttresses for it in Cath- 

 olic France. He explains in his preface that his intention is " to 

 make the reader see in the Hebrew word not only the Greek and 

 Latin, but also the Italian, the Spanish, the French, the German, 

 the Fleming, the English, and many others from all languages." 

 As the merest tyro in philology can now see, the great difficulty 

 that Guichard encounters is in getting from the Hebrew to the 

 Aryan group of languages. How he meets this difficulty may be 

 imagined from his statement, as follows : " As for the derivation 

 of words by addition, subtraction, and inversion of the letters, it 

 is certain that this can and ought thus to be done, if we would 

 find etymologies a thing which becomes very credible when we 

 consider that the Hebrews wrote from right to left and the Greeks 

 and others from left to right. All the learned recognize such 

 derivations as necessary ; . . . and . . . certainly otherwise one 

 could scarcely trace any etymology back to Hebrew." 



Of course, by this method of philological juggling, anything 

 could be proved which the author thought necessary to maintain 

 his pious theory. 



Two years later, Andrew Willett published at London his 

 Hexapla, or Six-fold Commentary upon Genesis. In this he in- 

 sists that the one language of all mankind in the beginning " was 

 the Hebrew tongue preserved still in Heber's family." He also 

 takes pains to say that the Tower of Babel " was not so called of 

 Belus, as some have imagined, but of confusion, for so the Hebrew 

 word ballot signifieth"; and he quotes from St. Chrysostom to 

 strengthen his position. 



In 1627 Dr. Constantine l'Empereur was inducted into the 

 chair of Philosophy of the Sacred Language in the University of 



Hebrew letters were invented by Adam. On Luther's view of the words " God said,'' 

 see Farrar, Language and Languages. For a most valuable statement regarding the 

 clashing opinions at the Reformation, see Max Miiller, as above, lecture iv, p. 1 32. Both 

 Miiller and Benfey note, as especially important, the difference between the Church view 

 and the ancient heathen view regarding " barbarians." See Miiller, as above, lecture iv, 

 p. 127, and Benfey, as above, p. 170 et scq. For a very remarkable list of Bibles printed 

 at an early period, see Benfey, p. 5G9. For quotation beginning with the words Dictiona- 

 ries of Latin and English, see Sayce. For Gesner, see his Mithridates (de differcntiis lin- 

 guarum), Zurich, 1555. For a similar attempt to prove that Italian was also derived from 

 Hebrew, see Giambullari, cited in Garlanda, p. 174. For Fulke, see the Parker Society's 

 publications, 1818, p. 224. For Whitaker, see reprint in the Parker Society's publications 

 for 1849, pp. 112-114. 



