172 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



sanctioned and accepted by his community. Man lias absolute 

 power and control over the changes and developments of language, 

 so long as he lets it run on its own peculiar lines. He is powerless 

 only when he would seek to turn the course of its growth and 

 develoj)ment into some channel other than that it started from and 

 which is invariably laid down and marked out, more often unconsci- 

 ously than not, while its speakers are uncultivated and in a pi-imitive 

 condition of being. And when it is asked why one language is 

 is superior to another, why one is much better adapted to the uses 

 to which we desire to put if we ask a counter question. AVhy i.s 

 the nose of the Jew for instance in general a more striking featiire 

 in him than in most other people 1 And the answer to this question 

 carries by inference the answer to the other, viz., because of some 

 remote ancestor of this people whose individuality and personality 

 of character was so remarkably strong as to leave one of its chief 

 features on all his descendants. Language may be said to resemble 

 oi-ganisms in other ways than mere similarity of formation, growth, 

 development, etc. As it is dominated by the law of its type so it is 

 also in much the same way by the law of the Survival of the 

 Fittest. That language which had the good foi'tune to be sent 

 rolling down the vistas of future ages by a superior master-hand, 

 will by its intrinsic merit and force be best able to adajit itself to 

 all the varying changes of its environment, and will undoubtedly 

 live and flourish while others less favored either remain stunted and 

 deformed, or else drop out of existence altogether. 



But while language is dominated by laws identical with some of 

 those running through the Oi-ganic Kingdom, and we are obliged 

 for lack of better to fall back upon the nomenclature of physiology 

 to mark its various changes and developments, it is only a warped, 

 prejudiced and unscientific mind that can po.ssibly mistake a mere 

 superficial resemblance for a deep-rooted living reality. 



Mr. Chambkrlaik referred to the different theories that had been advanced 

 to account for the origin of language. Noire (whose theory has been jjar- 

 tially endorsed by Max Miiller) ascribed the origin of roots to the sounds 

 simultaneously used in social acts, as when people work together in digging, 

 threshing, spinning, rowing, &c. These sounds become signs of repeated acts, 

 continuing in the memory as signs of such acts, and so became roots embody- 

 ing a concept, and being uttered bj"^ persons engaged in a common work are 

 understood by all. He (Mr. C.) was of the opinion that language was 



