18 JOHN READE ON LANGUAGE AND CONQUEST. 
Canon Farrar says that, so small has been the importance of the Allophylian races, as 
contributors to the sum of human progress, if they were all swept away from the face 
of the earth, vast as would be the numerical lacuna which they would leave in the 
population of the globe, “they would, with the exception of the Chinese, leave scarcely a 
single trace behind them in the religion, the history or the civilization of mankind.” Still, 
neither themselves nor their languages are unworthy of careful study, and of late years 
some of the foremost intellects of both hemispheres have been unitedly endeavoring to throw 
light on that most interesting portion of them whose career was passed on our own 
continent. 
What has been the share of those races of scattered and isolated tongues on the general 
onward movement of humanity ? Not so small, notwithstanding Dr. Farrar’s adverse ver- 
dict, as might at first appear. In Asia,as in Europe, and later on, in America, they occupied 
the place of aborigines to the Aryan or Indo-European colonies. If their speech was in far 
remote times akin to that of either Semite or Aryan, the missing link has not yet been 
found. But a century ago no one dreamed that the Hindoo was the kinsman of the Anglo- 
Saxon, the Celt and the Slay, and who can tell what discoveries of equal import may be in 
store for the diligent student of languages ? As science has already raised from the dead 
long buried races and breathed life and majesty and beauty into tongues long silent, may 
it not yet reach still farther into the shadowy past and, crossing the confines of the Aryan 
realm, extend its conquests to the time and place when Aryan and Turanian used acommon 
speech and worshipped at the same altar? * The main difficulty, in contemplating the 
Babel of Allophylian tongues is the lack of any means of judging whether they have 
remained the same or nearly the same as they were when the undivided Aryans lived 
among those who spoke them. It may be that the shock and attrition of rival tongues - 
have so transformed them that the ancestors of those who speak them to-day would no 
longer recognize them if they rose from the dead. This is the conclusion which some 
philologists have reached. Dr. Tylor says that the Chinese and the allied monosyllabic 
tongues, so often employed to illustrate what man’s primitive speech may have been, “ may 
not be primitive at all, but may come of the falling-away of older complicated grammar.” 

* T am not unaware that there is a school of philologists who maintain that in prehistoric times languages, 
instead of being fewer, were more numerous, than at present. The traditional notion of one original human speech 
has been almost universally given up by men of science. Paley, in the preface to his “ Hesiod,” thus states the 
view of early multiplied languages: “If one language had been given to man at first, we cannot explain the 
phenomenon of great families of languages possessing hardly any (if any) common elements. But we can easily 
explain this by supposing them to have been separate and wholly independent creations of the linguistic 
genius or faculty of man, consequent on a distant and final dispersion of the first families.” But even this view 
would not render hopeless the search after some essential bond of union between an Aryan or Semitic tongue and 
some unit or cluster of the so-called Allophylian languages which in times far remote had strayed away from its 
kindred surroundings. Hitherto; however, some of the supposed links exhibited have been so obviously absurd 
that even if a true bond of union were discovered, it might at first be looked upon with suspicion. Facts, never- 
theless, must ultimately assert themselves. The extraordinary discovery recently made (London Quarterly Review, 
July, 1882) of a connection between the most ancient literature of China and that of the Turanian founders of 
Babylon, when associated with the fact (as pointed out by Professor Sayce) that the culture of the Babylonians, 
including the art of writing, had been communicated to the Hittites and by them to the people of Asia Minor 
long before the introduction of the Phæœnician or Greek alphabet, tends to establish relations between the West 
and the far East hitherto undreamed of. (See Schlieman’s “ Zlios”, App. III). I£ succesfully followed up this 
discovery may show that our debt to the “Allophylians” is greater than our Western pride would, perhaps, 
willingly admit. 
