35 
the North. It was the policy of the Incas of Peru to enforce their own 
language on the various tribes they conquered, as the governmental or 
official language. After the conquest a million of the .borigines 
abandoned their various native dialects and adopted Spanish as their 
mother tongue. In Europe had not the Romans vanquished Carthage 
Pheenician Hebrew might have been the classical tongue of Europe 
instead of the Latin. The Latins conquered the Etrurians and 
Etruscan survives in a few fragmentary inscriptions. The Arabs con- 
quered Persia, and modern Persian is largely diluted with Arabic. 
The Turks overran Persian and incorporated Arabic words into their 
own agglutinative tongue. Russia still forbids the printing of little 
Russian dialects, spoken by 15,000,000 of her subjects, and compelled 
the Poles to abandon the use of their mother tongue ; they may not 
even pray aloud in Polish. Austria discourages the Czech of Bohemia, 
and imposes German on her Hungarian officers, who must perforce give 
up their native Magyar, a rich and flexible agglutinative member of a 
non-Aryan stock. In just the same way the Teutonic Norsemen of 
old grafted on the Anglo-Saxon stock the Norman-French they 
had themselves previously acquired as a foreign tongue in Gaul. In the 
early stages of civilization the balance of power is more easily destroyed ; 
confederations of tribes are often dependant on the superior cunning 
and power of one man. Such domination is rapidly dissolved on 
the death of the supreme chief, as was recently the case with Mtesa’s 
great kingdom in Central Africa, and the deposition of Cetewayo 
destroyed the conquering Zulu nation, whose language was understood 
by thirteen tribes, and was rapidly spreading over South Africa before 
we checked its propagation. Then the different communities break up 
again into smaller sections, relapse into barbarism, and the process of 
the unification of dialects is temporarily arrested. On the other hand 
the fact that contiguous languages are frequently found to differ widely 
from each other can be partially explained by the concomitant existence 
of two such centres emerging from barbarism. These, once permanently 
established in widely separated areas, radiate and extend their influence 
in different directions, gradually modify or exterminate intermediate 
dialects, and ultimately come into direct contact in thus respectively 
enlarging their borders. So varied and apparently contradictory are 
the natural forces acting and re-acting on the development, nay the 
very existence, of primitive languages. Of the death of languiges and 
dialects we can cite modern and ancient example from every linguistie 
stock and all parts of the world, the Semitic, Assyrian, the agglutinative 
Accadian of Asia. The Coptic ceased to be spoken in Africa in the 
17th century. A few inscriptions are all that survive of Etruscan in 
Europe, and Celtic-Cornish died with the last century. Four native 
dialects of Tasmania have become extinct since the colonization of 
Australia. Thus we have two distinct elements at work, the forces of 
_ barbarism tending to multiply dialects and the growth of civilization 
_ promoting the unification of languages. 
The axiom that human nature is pretty much alike all the world 
over may fairly be applied to earlier phases of the development of 
myths and of language. The physical conditions, material sur- 
roindings 24 rude social organization being ideutical, primitive men 
