129 



On the Insensible Gradation of Words, bij J. P. Lesley. 



What practically happened years ago to every fossil — namely, to 

 be studied in isolation, its surroundings and alhances unknown, is still 

 to a great extent, the fate of those fossils of the intellectual world, 

 words. When a word spoken by the people on this side of the globe 

 is seen or heard to be like a word spoken by the people on the other 

 side, if the meanings attached to its duplicate utterance can be allied, 

 and especially if several such alliances can be catalogued, although 

 merely as bald facts, ethnological reasoning upon origins and migra- 

 tions is at once proceeded with. It cannot be denied that the science 

 of comparative philology, although by no means in its infancy, la- 

 bours under the defects of this rude method. Its grammars indeed 

 are getting to be finished and proper tools for the scientific work- 

 man, but its vocabularies are still of a barbarous and impracticable 

 kind, mere museums of popular curiosities. It still remains a sub- 

 ject for future demonstration, that in philology, as in palaeontology, 

 the boundaries of genus and species are to be accounted conterminous; 

 that the organic forms pass into each other by almost insensible grada- 

 tions; and that not by hazard but by plan; and finally not by a plan 

 dependent upon the merely accidental variation of radical elements, 

 but on a plan of the variable and alternate development of members 

 of a complex structure. 



Philology, as to its history, has three departments. First, the 

 purely organic, containing all such involuntary or animal utterances, 

 as the difl^erent species of men make, for the same natural reason 

 that different species of animals quack, cluck, crow, scream, bark, 

 bray, howl or roar, each with sounds fixed by the quality of its or- 

 gans and by the emotions of its inner nature. It is to be expected 

 that the child's organs will utter rriodifications of a given sound ut- 

 tered with the same intent by an adult; and that one child will prefer 

 guttural and another child labial utterances. It is reasonable, also, 

 to expect that the African, the Malayan, the Esquimo, the Germanic 

 groups of languages will be radically characterized by different soft 

 and hard expressions, by liquid prefixes or guttural affixes, by sibi- 

 lants, chucklings, and murmurs of their own, as we find they actu- 

 ally are. The study of this department has been vigorously prose- 

 cuted in one direction by able men, among whom, in this country, 

 Kraitzer and Haldeman may be named as taking the lead. These 

 have pointed out a multitude of true natural expressions. They tell 

 us, for instance, that the Latin ex, K, S, and the English ou-t, may 



VOL. VII. R 



