704 CLASSICAL DECLKNSIONS AND CON J rCATlONS. 



" Philology has now become something of an exact and 

 developed science. Why should not the time, formerly expended 

 on driving youths, who never would be scholars, to learn para- 

 digms like parrots, but now more and more given to entirely 

 modern subjects, be partly used to give them an introduction to 

 elementary Aryan philology, together with vocabularies of Ger- 

 man, on the one side, and Latin, Greek on the other, this illus- 

 trating, with English or Dutch, the working of Grimm's and 

 similar laws? 



■ " I was once teaching Latin at Cape Town, in a very polyglot 

 class, to a Mohammedan boy from Bombay, with the help of 

 English and Dutch, and illustrations from his Hindustani. Just 

 as no one who had to learn the Romance tongue would wisely 

 attempt them without first learning the original Latin (especially 

 as phonetics has now made it possible to reduce the changes from 

 late Latin, in each derived tongue, to something like exact law), 

 so a simple course of comparative Aryan is surely a natural intro- 

 duction, even to the modern side, leading e.g. to Slavonic and other 

 languages, such as are needed, more than before, both during and 

 (in business) after the war; and on the other hand, providing the 

 Latin vocabulary, so necessary for real understanding and true 

 use of even colloquial English, and the Greek involved in scientific 

 and other technical nomenclature. 



" It may seem a long way round, but is really the shortest way 

 home. Only an hour's systematic but simple philological teaching 

 a week would do wonders for the language lessons, which might 

 be cut down themselves in consequence. Even school-teaching of 

 Sanskrit has, I hear, justified itself in one school, especially in 

 view to feeding our Indian Service ; but short O'f that, the 

 philological method and interest engendered will prove a most 

 valuable encouragement in attacking oriental, Semitic, and 

 African philology, so di rely needed, as travelling experience has 

 shown one, in a world-wide Empire. The needs of which we 

 British so tragically ignore." 



A form of the comparative vocabularies, referred to above, 

 v/as ]irovided by me in a ])a]:)er handed in at the Lourenco 

 Marques meeting of the Association, under a title wdiich puzzled 

 some at the time : " The Humour of Indo-German Cognates." 

 This paper consists of parallel vocabularies of (hypo- 

 thetic) Aryan, Greek, Latin, German, Dutch and English, ranged 

 under Hirt's symbolic bases representing the philological i)ossi 

 bilities in the way of combination of sounds (a glance .tl the 

 paper itself will explain), together with somewhat comic illustra- 

 tions and examples, in the form of sentences of an ultra 

 " Chardenal " pattern, intended to rouse the interest of youth. 

 The whole was, I fear, rather Macabre, but the Association, with 

 some initial hesitation about the sanity of the compiler, were good 

 enough to publish the paper in extcnso. It is obvious, however, 

 that some grammar must be added, of more importance to philo- 



