ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY. 683 



is iio such thing as "words only," that every new word represented 

 really a most niomentous event m the development of our race. What 

 people call ''mere words" are in truth the monuments of the fiercest 

 intellectual battles, triumphal arches of the grandest victories won by 

 the intellect of man. Wlien man had formed names for body and soul, 

 for father and mother, and not till then did the first act of human his- 

 tory begin. Not till there were names for right and wrong, for God 

 and man, could there be anything worthy of the name of human society. 

 Every new word was a discovery, and these early discoveries, if but 

 properly understood, are more important to us than the greatest con- 

 quests of the kings of Egypt and Babylon. 



Not one of our greatest explorers has unearthed with his spade or 

 pick-axe more splendid i^alaces and temples, whether in Egypt or in 

 Babylon, than the etymologist. Every word is the palace of a human 

 thought; and in scientific etymology we possess the charm with which 

 to call these ancient thoughts back to life. It is the study of words, 

 it is the Science of Language, that has withdrawn the curtain which 

 formerly concealed these ancient times and their intellectual struggles 

 fioiu the sight of historians. Even now, when scholars speak of lan- 

 guages, and families of languages, they often forget that languages 

 mean speakers of languages, and families of speech presuppose real 

 families, or classes, or powerful confederacies, which have struggled 

 for their existence and held their ground against all enemies. Lan- 

 guages, as we read in the book of Daniel, are the same as nations that 

 dwell on all the earth. If, therefore, Greeks and Eomans, Celts, Ger- 

 mans, Slavs, Persians, and Indians, speaking different languages, and 

 each forming a separate nationality, constitute, as long as we know 

 them, a real historical fact, there is another fact equally real and his- 

 torical, though we may refer it to a prehistoric period, namely, that 

 there was a time when the ancestors of all these nations and languages 

 formed one compact body, speaking one and the same language, a lan- 

 guage so real, so truly historical, that without it there.would never have 

 been a real Greek, a real Latin language; never a Greek republic, 

 never a Boman empire; there would have been no Sanskrit, no Yedas, 

 no Avesta, no Plato, no Greek New Testament. We know with the 

 same certainty that other nations and languages, also, which in histor- 

 ical times stand before us so isolated as Phenician, Hebrew, Babylon 

 ian, and Arabic, pre-suppose a prehistoric, that is, an antecedent 

 powerful Semitic confederacy, held together by the bonds of a common 

 language, possibly by the same laws, and by a belief in the same gods. 

 Unless the ancestors of these nations and languages had once lived 

 and worked together there would have been no common arsenal from 

 which the leading nations of Semitic history could have taken their 

 armor and their swords, the armor and swords which they wielded in 

 their intellectual struggles, and many of which we are still wielding 

 ourselves in our wars of liberation from error and in our conquests of 



