NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 435 



a missionary in America, he enlarged his catalogue of languages 

 to six volumes, which were published in Spanish in 1800. His 

 work contained specimens of more than three hundred languages, 

 and the grammars of more than forty. It should be said to his 

 credit that Hervas dared point out with especial care the limits of 

 the Semitic family of languages, and declared, as a result of his 

 enormous studies, that the various languages of mankind could 

 not have been derived from the Hebrew. 



While such work was done in Catholic Spain, Protestant Ger- 

 many was honored by the work of Adelung. It contained the 

 Lord's Prayer in nearly five hundred languages and dialects, and 

 the comparison of these early in the nineteenth century helped to 

 end the sway of Scriptural philology. 



But the period which intervened between Leibnitz and this 

 modern development was a period of philological chaos. It be- 

 gan mainly with the doubts which Leibnitz had forced upon 

 Europe, and the end of it only began with the study of Sanskrit 

 in the latter half of the eighteenth century, followed by the com- 

 parisons made by means of the collections of Catharine, Hervas, 

 and Adelung at the beginning of the nineteenth. The old theory 

 that Hebrew was the original language had fallen into disrepute, 

 but nothing had taken its place as a finality. Great authorities, 

 like Buddeus, were still cited in behalf of the narrower belief, but 

 everywhere researches, unorganized though they were, tended to 

 destroy it. The story of Babel continued indeed throughout the 

 whole eighteenth century to hinder or warp scientific investiga- 

 tion, and a very curious illustration of this fact is seen in the 

 book of Lord Nelme on The Origin and Elements of Language. 

 He declares that the incident of the confusion was the cleaving 

 of America from Europe, and regards the most terrible chapters 

 in the Book of Job as intended for a description of the flood, 

 which in all probability he had from Noah himself. Again, Row- 

 land Jones tried to prove that Celtic was the primitive tongue, 

 and that it passed through Babel unharmed. Still another effort 

 was made by a Breton to prove that all languages took their rise 

 in the language of Brittany. All was chaos. The old theory had 

 gone to pieces, but no new theory had yet been formed. There 

 was much wrangling, but little earnest controversy. Here and 

 there theologians were calling out frantically, beseeching the 

 Church to save the old doctrince as " essential to the truth of 

 Scripture " ; here and there other divines began to foreshadow the 

 inevitable compromise which has always been thus vainly at- 

 tempted in the history of every science. But it was soon seen by 

 thinking men that no concessions as yet spoken of by theologians 

 were sufficient. In the latter half of the century came the bloom 

 period of the French philosophers and encyclopedists, of the Eng- 



