438 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Latin. Others exercised their ingenuity in picking the new dis- 

 covery to pieces, and still others attributed it all to th^ machina- 

 tions of Satan. 



On the other hand, the more thoughtful men in the Church 

 endeavored to save something from the wreck of the old system 

 by a compromise. They attempted to prove that Hebrew is at 

 least a cognate tongue with the original speech of mankind, if not 

 the original speech itself ; but here they were confronted by the 

 authority whom they dreaded most, the great Christian scholar, 

 Sir William Jones himself. His words were : " I can only declare 

 my belief that the language of Noah is irretrievably lost. After 

 diligent search I can not find a single word used in common by 

 the Arabian, Indian, and Tartar families, before the intermixture 

 of dialects occasioned by the Mohammedan conquests." 



So, too, in Germany came full acknowledgment of the new 

 truth, and from a man won over to the Roman Catholic Church, 

 Frederick Schlegel. He accepted the discoveries in the old lan- 

 guage and literature of India as final : he saw the significance of 

 these discoveries as regards philology, and grouped the languages 

 of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany under the name 

 afterward so universally accepted Indo-Germanic. 



It now began to be felt more and more, even among the most 

 devoted churchmen, that the old theological dogmas regarding 

 the origin of language, as held " always, everywhere, and by all," 

 were wrong, and that Lucretius and sturdy old St. Gregory of 

 ISTyssa were right. 



But this was not the only wreck. During ages the great men 

 in the Church had been calling upon the world to wonder over the 

 amazing exploit of Adam in naming the animals which Jehovah 

 had brought before him, and to accept the history of language in 

 the light of this exploit. The early fathers, the mediaeval doc- 

 tors, the great divines of the Reformation period, Catholic and 

 Protestant, had united in this universal chorus. Clement of 

 Alexandria declared Adam's naming of the animals proof of a 

 prophetic gift. St. John Chrysostom insisted that it was an evi- 

 dence of consummate intelligence. Eusebius held that the phrase 

 " that was the name thereof " implied that each name embodied 

 the real character and description of the animal concerned. 



This view was echoed by a multitude of divines in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries. Typical among these was the 

 great Dr. South, who, in his sermon on The State of Man before 

 the Fall, declared that " Adam came into the world a philosopher, 

 which sufficiently appears by his writing the nature of things 

 upon their names." 



In the chorus of modern English divines there appeared one of 

 eminence who declared against this theory : sturdy old Dr. Shuck- 



