92 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE 



By HORATIO HALE. 



It is the characteristic of modern science that it seeks to account 

 for all development and progress by the operation of existing causes. 

 In an address delivered before the Section of Anthropology in the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the meeting 

 of 1866, T sought to show in what manner this general law is applied 

 to elucidate the history of language. The origin of linguistic stocks 

 or families has been deemed one of the most mysterious problems in 

 philological science. There are, so far as our present knowledge ex- 

 tends, between two and three hundred of such stocks, differing totally 

 from one another both in vocabulary and in grammar. Various 

 hypotheses have been offered to explain their origin, but none has been 

 generally accepted as satisfactory. Pi'ofessor Max Mtiller, in his 

 " Science of Language," considers the problem extremely difficult, but 

 not insoluble. He compares it to the question of the plurality of 

 inhabited worlds, but deems it not quite as hopeless. He believes 

 (and, as I hope to show, with justice) that it may receive a solution 

 which will demonstrate that all languages have proceeded from one 

 source. On the other hand, Professor Hovelacque, in his excellent work 

 " La Linguistique," presents the fact of the existence of " a multipli- 

 city of irreducible linguistic systems," as " a capital argument " in 

 favor of that polygenist view, which holds that man, originally speech- 

 less, acquired the faculty of speech in as many different places as there 

 are different linguistic stocks. 



This view, it will be seen, though maintained by a ^distinguished 

 evolutionist, is in itself anti-evolutionary ; for it assigns the origin of 

 linguistic stocks to a cause no longer in operation. In the address 



