90 GRAMMAR OF THE LANGUAGE 



may with safety assert; that lie would have been ahle to say 

 more in fewer words, than even in his own admirable Greek. 

 Every mode of speech has its peculiar qualities, susceptible 

 of beinu developed and improved by. cultivation ; but,- like 

 flowers and pints, all languages have a regular organiza- 

 tion, and none can be called barbarous in the sense which 

 presumption has affixed t<> that word. An unorganized lan- 

 guage would be a chaos, unfit to be used as the medium 

 of intercourse between men. No memory could retain a 

 long list of arbitrary words, if order and method, founded 

 on analogy, did not come to its aid. Grammatical forms, 

 therefore, are as necessary to human languages as the or- 

 gans of life and vegetation are to animals and plants. Nei- 

 ther could exist without them. 



In the idiom before us we have an example of what na- 

 ture can produce, unaided by the theories of science and the 

 refinements of art. To assign to each its proper share in 

 the composition of such noble instruments as the languages 

 of men is not among the least important questions which 

 philology presents to our inquiry. It deserves to be tho- 

 roughly investigated. The result, it is true, will be morti- 

 fying to our pride; but that pride, which makes us ascribe 

 so much to our own efforts, and so little to the silent and 

 unperceived operations of nature, is the greatest obstacle 

 that we meet in our road to knowledge, and we cannot pro- 

 ceed very far in the discovery of natural causes while we 

 remain disposed to attribute every thing to our so much 

 boasted civilization, our limited sciences, and our mimic arts. 



