Atkinson. — The Aryo-Semitic Maori. 57l 



These, then, are my contributions, such as they are, towards 

 the wider aiDplication of Mr. Tregear's method. In return, I 

 hope I may ask that he will furnish his followers with better 

 means than they yet have of answering objections which unbe- 

 lievers are sure to make. Some will insist, and with a good deal 

 of authority on their side, that the primary test of relationship 

 in languages is in their grammars, and not in their vocabu- 

 laries. Others will require more evidence of relationship in 

 vocabulary than the mere juxtaposition in opposite columns of 

 series of words more or less similar. 



On the latter point, I confess, after what I had been doing 

 myself, I felt a good deal uneasy on reading the following 

 passages in Professor Whitney's "Life and Growth of Language," 

 pp. 267 and 812 :— " The changes of linguistic usage are all the 

 time separating in appearance what really belongs together : 

 bishop and eveque are historically one word ; so are eye and ange ; 

 so are I and je and ik and egdn and aham : though not one of 

 them has an audible element which is found in any other. And 

 then the same changes are bringing together what really belongs 

 apart ; the Latin locus, and Sanskrit lokas, ' place, room,' have 

 really nothing to do with one another, though so nearly identical 

 and in closely related languages ; likewise Greek holes, and 

 English whole, and so on. We may take the English language 

 (as too many do) and compare it with every unrelated dialect 

 in existence, and find a liberal list of apparent, correspondences, 

 which, then, a little study of the English words will prove 

 unreal and fallacious. . . . The whole process of linguistic 

 research begins in and depends upon etymology, the tracing 

 out of the histories of individual words and elements. . . . 

 On accuracy in etymological processes, then, depends the success 

 of the whole ; and the perfecting of the methods of etymologizing 

 is what especially distinguishes the new linguistic science from 

 the old. The old worked upon the same basis on which the 

 new now works — namely, on the tracing of resemblances or 

 analogies between words in regard to form and meaning. But 

 the former was hopelessly superficial. It was guided by surface 

 likenesses, without regard to essential diversity which might 

 underlie them — as if the naturalist were to compare and 

 class together green leaves, green wings of insects, green 

 paper, and green laminae of minerals ; it was heedless of 

 the source whence its material came : it did not, in short, 

 command its subject sufficiently to have a method. A 

 wider knowledge of facts, and a consequent better compre- 

 hension of their relations, changed all this. Especially the 

 separation of languages into famihes, with their divisions and 

 subdivisions, the recognition of non-relationships and relation- 

 ships, and degrees of relationship, effected the great revolution 

 by changing the principles on which the probable value of 



