133 



are fragments. All language is a breccia, or rather it resembles the 

 great fossiliferous lime-rocks of the coal measures, full of the parted 

 joints of encriiii, once connected into living, waving, propagating 

 stems and flowers of stone. In the construction of charts like these one 

 can see how the stems came to be disjointed, and the isolated discs to 

 be so strewn hither and thither among the secondary sediments of 

 speech, the dialects of different tribes. To illustrate this: here is one 

 actual formula of fragmentation. 



rj,.. 



Hair <( 196 

 I 191 

 L 196 



Here we have the reduplicated form of the compound guttural, 

 labial and lingual, and the dropping away of one part after another, 

 until nothing but the end remains. 



The selection of these five particular objects of speech was made 

 because they are among the most familiar to men, and have simple or 

 unequivocal meanings, and therefore ought to be named alike in all 

 languages, if such a fact were possible. Yet we see how they merely 

 play different groups of runs upon the same gamut. They were selected 

 also as good examples of a principal or type arrangement of the ele- 

 ments in the full form, Ka Ba Ra Ta, the historical meaning of which 

 I have endeavoured, in papers read before the American Association, 

 to illustrate. There are undoubtedly many such type forms, all of 

 which can be wrought out by this method of visible classification. 



The positive results to be arrived at then seem to be these — 1. The 

 same radical sound, Ba fop example (modulated of course as Pa, Fa, 

 Va, Wa, Ma), can be found in a large majority of languages, standing 

 as a name for a majority of the objects of thought expressed by speech. 



2. In the midst of this apparent wilderness of confusion, a very 

 evident order will come to view, when all the sounds employed to 

 represent one idea are classified in vertical columns; and this order 

 will consist in their various ^rowpmo-^. Each idea is indeed expressed 

 by all the signs known to the ear of man, but is most often expressed, 

 or in other words is expressed by the greater nvmher of months^ in 

 one kind of way, that is, by one group of analogous words larger than 

 all the other groups. The idea will be recognised as having, so to 

 speak, a greater run upon one set of elements or combinations. And 

 we may hope that as Lesquerox has succeeded in recognizing each 



