344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



posed by force or persuasion, have been transformed according to 

 races while keeping identical names. The Spanish- American re- 

 publics adopted the democratic Constitution of the United States ; 

 but with those races that form of organization, which had made 

 the United States so great, was quickly transformed into a rule of 

 bloody dictatorships and frightful anarchy. A people may, in an 

 extreme case, forcibly impose its institutions on a different race, 

 as England has done in Ireland, but decadence is the result to the 

 subjected people. 



So language, even though it be fixed by writing, is necessarily 

 changed in passing from one people to another ; and this is what 

 renders absurd the idea of a universal language. It is true that 

 the Gauls, notwithstanding the superiority of their numbers, 

 adopted the Latin language within two centuries of the conquest ; 

 but they soon changed it to suit their wants and their special 

 mental moods, and the French resulted at last — an idiom very 

 different from the Spanish and Italian, though having a common 

 origin with them. In India, with its numerous and various races, 

 there are said to be two hundred and forty languages, some of 

 them differing from others as much as French from Greek, and 

 three hundred dialects. The most generally prevalent of them is 

 modern, being only three hundred years old — Hindustani, formed 

 by the combination of the Persian and Arabic of the Mussulman 

 conquerors with the native Hindi. Conquerors and conquered 

 quickly forgot their own language to take up a new one adapted 

 to the conditions of a mixed people. 



These brief illustrations, which could be extended indefinitely, 

 show how deep are the transformations to which peoples subject 

 the elements of a civilization which they borrow. The loan often 

 seems considerable because the names change abruptly ; but it is 

 always, in its beginnings, really very small. In the course of ^en- 

 furies, by the slow labors of generations, the borrowed element, 

 with the successive additions made to it, at last differs much 

 from that for which it was substituted. History, which regards 

 words most, takes hardly any account of these successive varia- 

 tions ; and when it tells us, for instance, that a people adopted a 

 new religion, we conceive at once, not the creed that was really 

 adopted, but the religion as we know it now. A close study of 

 these slow adaptations is necessary for the proper comprehension 

 of their genesis and of the differences in the case between words 

 and realities. 



The history of civilization is thus composed of slow adapta- 

 tions, of successive minute transformations. If they seem sud- 

 den and considerable to us, it is because, as in geology, we sup- 

 press the intermediate phases, and regard only the extremes. 



However intelligent and well endowed we may suppose a peo- 



