581 



LII.— Proceedings of the Scientific Societies of London. 



1. Ethnological Society. (4, St. Martin's Place.) 



May QtJi, 1865. 



The papers read were : — 1. " On Language and Ethnology." By 

 tlie Eev. E. AV. Earrar. The views of the author were that the 

 diversity of languages was primordial, and that they originated at 

 different geographical centres. The search for the primitive lan- 

 guage has come to be regarded as a vagary to be ranked ^dth the 

 attempts to discover the quadrature of the circle or the prunum 

 onohile. But obviously, if all languages were derived from oue, that 

 one must have been the primitive language, and ought, therefore, 

 with our present philological knowledge, to be easily discoverable. 

 Accordingly, whole volumes have been written on the subject, and 

 among many languages. Low Dutch, Swedish, Basque, Irish, and 

 Polynesian, have all been claimants for the honour of having been 

 the language of Paradise, and it has even been supposed that the 

 primitive language was restored at Pentecost. Hebrew, however, 

 has been the most persistent candidate, and nothing was easier than 

 the proof of its pretensions. It was simply this : all were descended 

 from Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew, therefore 

 Hebrew is the primitive language. But this syllogism lost sight of 

 the fact that the Hebrews were among the very few nations who had 

 considered the problem of the diversity of tongues, and that in the 

 passage which deals with the subject, they attributed the fact to 

 direct confusion miraculously introduced into all human speech. 



Many eminent ethnologists have been jealous of the encroach- 

 ment of philology on their domain, but the author thought philology 

 and ethnology ought to be sister studies, and that though they 

 worked separately, their conclusions should be combined. That 

 there is one small family of languages united by the closest affinities, 

 Hebrew, Phoenician, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, and Arabic, has 

 always been recognized ; and to this family the faulty, but not incon- 

 venient and conventional name of Semitic has been given. The dis- 

 covery of Sanskrit brought to our notice a language coeval ■v\^th, if 

 not anterior to, the Hebrew, and utterly distinct from it— a language 



