131 



reference to this last, that a few elements of a primary order are every- 

 where employed in language as in chemistry, to construct elements 

 of a second order and a third and a fourth, by a few simple laws of 

 change, in such a series of gradations, that any word out of the 

 thousand used commonly by any people may be selected indifferently 

 and discussed with the same results as any other word ; that even 

 any given compound word will be found present in some well recognized 

 form in nearly all the languages known, and yet will have different 

 meanings in most of them; that there is therefore not the most distant 

 approach to a common or universal language for all mankind beyond 

 the fact that all use the same elements in the same endless round of 

 composition, and cannot get out of this round; that the presence of 

 the same words in two or more languages is therefore no prima facie 

 evidence of kinship between the two or more tribes speaking those 

 languages; that, therefore, ethnology cannot be considered as having 

 yet taken hold of philology as one of its tools by the right handle, or 

 turned it to any useful purpose beyond the determination of very local 

 questions. It can be shown, probably, that the study of philology must 

 be distributed between — first, a strict investigation by expert naturalists 

 into the primary animal sounds made by the species or varieties of 

 mankind; secondly, an investigation of those words in hieroglyphic, 

 classical and mediaeval history and mytholog}^ which remain to re- 

 present those old introduced non-animal, transcendental ideas by 

 invented signs, by arbitrarily attached sounds, and by mysteriously 

 arrano;od syllables; and thirdly, the classification of all words used to 

 express such ideas in modern times, according to the laws now so 

 well understood and obeyed in the study of chemical elements, fossils, 

 and objects of the actual nature. 



The charts appended to this paper will speak for themselves in 

 explanation of these views. They represent the gradual passage, 

 through groups of ibrms, of the names which mankind have given to 

 the five objects, MAN, HEAD, HAIR, HAND and STONE, in 200 

 languages, more or less. They have been made up from the Russian 

 Comparative Vocabulary of Catherine I, from the Mithridates, from 

 Comparative Vocabularies of the dialects of the Caucasus, from Hale's 

 Volume of the Exploring Expedition, and a few other sources of in- 

 formation open to all. Very few of the African words, however, are 

 given, and only enough American words for comparison, as the object 

 was to illustrate the subject, not to furnish a perfect specimen. In 

 selecting letters the expression of the sound has been kept in view as 

 the primary object, where it did not conceal the graduation. Hence 



