146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have, on the whole, undergone little change while remaining there, 

 but some alterations are traced as due to migration into new climates. 

 Even these are difficult to follow, masked as they are by the more 

 striking changes produced by intermarriage of races. Now, the view 

 that the races of man are to be accounted for as varied descendants of 

 one original stock is zoologically i:)robable from the close resemblance 

 of all men in body and mind, and the freedom with which races inter- 

 cross. If it was so, then the fact of the different races already exist- 

 ing early in the historical period compels the naturalist to look to a 

 prehistoric period for their development to have taken place in. And, 

 considering how strongly differenced are the negro and the Syrian, 

 and how slowly such changes of complexion and feature take place 

 within historical experience, this prehistoric period was probably of 

 vast length. The evidence from the languages of the world points in 

 the same direction. In times of ancient history we already meet with 

 families of languages, such as the Aryan and the Semitic, and as later 

 history goes on many other families of language come into view, such 

 as the Bantu or Caffre of Africa, the Dravidian of South India, the 

 Malayo-Polynesian, the Algonquin of North America, and other fami- 

 lies. But what we do not find is the parent language of any of these 

 families, the original language which all the other members are dia- 

 lects of, so that this parent tongue should stand toward the rest in the 

 relation which Latin holds to its descendants, Italian and French. It 

 is, however, possible to work back by the method of philological com- 

 parison, so as to sketch the outlines of that early Aryan tongue which 

 must have existed to produce Sanskrit and Persian, Greek and Latin, 

 German, Russian, and Welsh, or the outlines of that early Semitic 

 tongue which must have existed to produce Assyrian, Phoenician, He- 

 brew, and Arabic, Though such theoretical reconstructions of parent 

 language from their descendants may only show a vague and shadowy 

 likeness to the reality, they give some idea of it. And what concerns 

 us here is that theoretical early Aryan and Semitic, or other such re- 

 constructed languages, do not bring our minds appreciably nearer to 

 really primitive forms of speech. However far we get back, the signs 

 of development from still . earlier stages are there. The roots have 

 mostly settled into forms which no longer show the reasons why they 

 were originally chosen, while the inflections only in part preserve traces 

 of their original senses, and the whole structure is such as only a long- 

 lost past can account for. To illustrate this important point, let us 

 remember the system of grammatical gender in Greek or German, how 

 irrationally a classification by sex is applied to sexless objects and 

 thoughts, while even the use of a neuter gender fails to set the confu- 

 sion straight, and sometimes even twists it with a new perversity oj 

 its own. Many a German and Frenchman wishes he could follow the 

 example of our English forefathers who, long ago, threw overboard the 

 whole worthless cargo of grammatical gender. But, looking at gender 



