66 THE 0YS7'ER. 



unfamiliar and unintelligible, but as our ears become 

 more accustomed to the strange sounds we find many 

 which are not as unintelligible as they seemed at first. 



When a German talks of his vater, his imitter, his 

 briider^ his sclnuester, when he asks us to share his 

 brod tmd butter, or offers us a glas wassej'^ we need no 

 dictionary to tell us what he means. 



We know that the Americans and the English of 

 to-day are descended from common ancestors, only a 

 few generations back, from whom they have inherited 

 their common language, and we know from literature 

 that this was not exactly the same as modern English 

 or modern American, and history also tells us that 

 still further back, Anglo-Saxon and modern German 

 had a common starting-point. Philologists therefore 

 make use of the resemblances between languages to 

 trace out their origin, and whenever they find that two 

 or three languages have a common plan, a funda- 

 mental similarity of grammatical structure, they be- 

 lieve that they are divergent modifications from a 

 common starting-point. In some cases printed lan- 

 guage has preserved an actual history of the process, 

 but in other cases, where there is no such history, the 

 student of comparative grammar forms his conclusions 

 by comparison ; and, even where the primitive lan- 

 guage is lost, he is able to reconstruct it in part, for he 

 knows that it must have been characterized by all the 

 features which its derivatives have in common. 



Now, animals exhibit resemblances of very much 

 the same character as those between languages, and 

 when we find that several representatives of a great 

 group are constructed upon the same fundamental 



