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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



is followed by a proposal to gag the 

 German Parliament, the " Reichstag." 

 Previous enactments having muzzled 

 the press and silenced the voice of pub- 

 lic meetings, a law was still required 

 to fetter legislative debate whenever it 

 threatened to take a range displeasing 

 to the authority by which the country 

 is really ruled. It is difficult for us to 

 put the case in any other way than that 

 Bismarck is ruling Germany by a poli- 

 cy which he knows will not bear free 

 discussion. 



That a Government founded upon 

 arbitrary power, which plunders the 

 country to sustain its armies, drags 

 young men into its armies, drives chil- 

 dren to school, and crushes the liberty 

 of speech, should apply its restrictive 

 methods also to trade, is not surprising. 

 The enslavement of commerce belongs 

 with the other tyrannical practices and 

 enactments of the past ; and the liberty 

 of commerce can come only with the 

 other liberties when the militant com- 

 pulsory forms of society are outgrown 

 or subordinated. That Bismarck should 

 favor the hampering of German trade 

 by increasing restrictive duties, as shown 

 by a recent letter upon the subject, is 

 no more surprising than his violations 

 of the otlier natural rights of German 

 citizens. Tariffs are the best means by 

 which rapacious governments can get 

 possession of the money of the people, 

 and Bismarck must have money. 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



Origin, Progress, and Destiny of the 

 English Language and Literature. 

 By John A. Weisse, M. D. New York : 

 J. W. Bouton. ISYQ. Pp. SOO. Price, 



$5. 



Two purposes are intended by the au- 

 thor of this work : first, to set forth a his- 

 tory of the English language and literature ; 

 and, second, to show the fitness of the Eng- 

 hsh to become the universal language of 

 civilized man. The Anglo-Saxon, the source 

 from which English has sprung, was a com- 



posite language, consisting of three prin- 

 cipal Gotho-Germanic elements, viz., the 

 slightly variant dialects of the three north- 

 ern nations which in the fifth century es- 

 tablished themselves in Britain — the Jutes, 

 the Saxons, and the Angles. The author's 

 plan did not contemplate any set inquiry 

 into the origin of these dialects ; he has 

 but little to say about their descent from 

 one more ancient mother-language — the Ar- 

 yan — he simply accepts them as a fact, and 

 then proceeds to show how by the natural 

 process of development, profoundly modi- 

 fied by the environment, they, or rather the 

 one composite language, Anglo-Saxon, was 

 compounded with other elements to form 

 first the Franco-English (a. d. 1200 to 

 1600), and finally the English language as 

 it now is. Dr. Weisse's method consists in 

 setting before the reader specimens of the 

 literature of the successive centuries from 

 the invasion of the Angles, Saxons, and 

 Jutes, down to the present time, and classi- 

 fying the words according to the linguistic 

 sources from which they come. The result 

 shows the proportion of Anglo-Saxon, Lat- 

 in, Greek, French, and other elements con- 

 stituting the sum of the language at any 

 given period. It shows, further, the changes 

 undergone by the form of the language, if 

 we may so designate its grammar, as dis- 

 tinguished from its matter, i. e., its vocabu- 

 lary. Anglo-Saxon was a language possess- 

 ing a variety of inflections to designate by 

 the termination or by prefixes the diverse 

 relations between words or their signifi- 

 cates. Of these inflections English retains 

 but few : a possessive (or genitive) case for 

 nouns ; an accusative (or dative) for some 

 pronouns ; the plural sign s final for nouns, 

 and the final s in the third person singular 

 of the verb ; an imperfect (or aorist) tense 

 of verbs ; and perhaps some other traces. 

 For the most part we now express by 

 " prepositions," or by " auxiliary verbs," 

 the relations expressed in Anglo-Saxon by 

 inflections, or root modifications. Our au- 

 thor's specimens from the literature af the 

 successive ages make all this very plain. 

 Then the changes in the matter of the Ian- 

 guage, its invasion by foreign words, are 

 exhibited. The first literary specimen in 

 the volume is taken from Ethelbert's code 

 of laws, which dates from the year 597. 

 Here, as in the case of all the specimens 



