166 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



what he is — the master of articulate speech — and from tliis phy- 

 siological fact alone, be claims a place for that purely conventional 

 medium of thought — language, among the Natural Sciences. 



But seemingly conscious of the weakness of this argument, he 

 brings in another by way of strengthening it, viz., in the fact, to use 

 his own words, that no man or group of men is competent arbitrarily 

 to change the structure of its language. The morphological evolution 

 of language defies all convention, all encroachment ; it goes on by 

 virtue of its own force, more or less slowly or speedily, but without 

 the fancy or the pleasure of men having any power to diverc it from 

 its course. On these two facts, the former at best true only of the 

 facultjj or j)oioer of speech, and the latter less than half true, he 

 sweepingly puts aside all objections to his theory and declares that 

 the study of language must be classed among the Natural Sciences. 

 Having got so far he now finds no difiiculty in asserting language to 

 be an organism. What (he asks in effect) are the charactei'istics of 

 an organism Formation, growth, development, decay, these are just 

 the characteristics of language; ergo language is an organism. 

 Frivolous as this kind of reasoning may appear it is just what Mons. 

 Havelocque used. Languages, he says arise, are developed, pass on 

 to decadence and perish like other organised beings, and there can be 

 no doubt that language behaves in reality like an organism, and that 

 it is in a constant state of evolution, that is to say, because language 

 has a birth, growth, development, decadence and because these are the 

 identical terms used in speaking of the evolution of an organism, 

 terms borrowed indeed from the nomenclature of Physiology, 

 language forsooth must be an organism. 



This I contend is the only fair deduction that one can make from 

 his statement. Following on this, he goes on to show the successive 

 evolutions of this new oi-ganism, i-unning somewhat superficially 

 through the principal phases of linguistic development. Basing his 

 remarks on the theory proposed by Wm. Schlegel in 1818, viz., that 

 all languages first pass through a monosyllabic period, which the 

 I'esult of later research and study has confirmed and strengthened 

 and which although we are not acquainted with any language in its 

 embryonic or even strictly speaking mono.syllabic stage, notwith- 

 standing is undoubtedly the first phase of linguistic life, he tells us 

 that existing monosyllabic languages have greatly improved upon 



