Brinton.l «^"C) [March 20, 



idioms left by the diligent collector and "linguist, the Abbe 

 Hervas. 



A few years later, in 1812, we find him writing to his friend 

 Baron Alexander von Rennenkampff, then in St. Petersburg : 

 " I have selected the American languages as the special subject 

 of my investigations. I'hey have the closest relationship of any 

 with the tongues of north-eastern Asia; and I beg you therefore 

 to obtain for me all the dictionaries and grammars of the latter 

 which you can."* 



It is probable from this extract that Humboldt was then 

 studying these languages from that limited, ethnographic point 

 of view, from which he wrote his essay on the Basque tongue, the 

 announcement of which appeared, indeed, in that year, 1812, 

 although the work itself was not issued until 1821, 



Ten years more of study and reflection taught him a far 

 loftier flight. lie came to look upon each language as an 

 organism, all its parts bearing harmonious relations to each 

 other, and standing in a definite connection with the intellectual 

 and emotional development of the nation speaking it. Each 

 language again bears the relation to language in general that the 

 species does to the genus, or the genus to the order, and by 

 a comprehensive process of analysis he hoped to arrive at those 

 fundamental laws of articulate speech which form the Philosophy 

 of Language, and which, as they are also the laws of human 

 thought, at a certain point coincide, he believed, with those of 

 the Philosophy of History. 



In the completion of this vast scheme, he continued to attach 

 the utmost importance to the American languages. His illus- 

 trations were constantly drawn from them, and they were ever 

 the subject of his earnest studies. He prized them as in certain 

 respects the most valuable of all to the philosophic student of 

 human speech. 



Thus, in 1826, he announced before the Berlin Academy that 

 he was preparing an exhaustive work on the " Organism of 

 Language," for which he had selected the American languages 

 exclusively, as best suited for this purpose. " The languages of 

 a great continent," he writes, " peopled by numerous nationali- 



* Aus Wilhelm von HumboldV s letzien Lebensjahren. Eine Millheilung bixher un- 

 bekannter Brie/e. Von Theodor Distel, p. 19 (Leipzig, 1883). 



