190 DARWINISM STATED BY DARWIN HIMSELF. 



in all things. The survival or preservation of certain 

 favored words in the struggle for existence is natural 

 selection. 



The perfectly regular and wonderfully complex con- 

 struction of the languages of many barbarous nations has 

 often been advanced as a proof, either of the divine ori- 

 gin of these languages, or of the high art and former 

 civilization of their founders. Thus F. von Schlegel 

 writes : "In those languages which appear to be at the 

 lowest grade of intellectual culture, we frequently ob- 

 serve a very high and elaborate degree of art in their 

 grammatical structure. This is especially the case with 

 the Basque and the Lapponian, and many of the Ameri- 

 can languages." But it is assuredly an error to speak of 

 any language as an art, in the sense of its having been 

 elaborately and methodically formed. Philologists now 

 admit that conjugations, declensions, etc., originally ex- 

 isted as distinct words, since joined together ; and, as such 

 words express the most obvious relations between objects 

 and persons, it is not surprising that they should have 

 been used by the men of most races during the earliest 

 ages. With respect to perfection, the following illustra- 

 tion will best show how easily we may err : a crinoid 

 sometimes consists of no less than one hundred and fifty 

 thousand pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect sym- 

 metry in radiating lines ; but a naturalist does not con- 

 sider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bi- 

 lateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none 

 of these parts alike, excepting on the opposite sides of 

 the body. He justly considers the differentiation and 

 specialization of organs as the test of perfection. So with 

 languages ; the most symmetrical and complex ought not 

 to be ranked above irregular, abbreviated, and bastard- 

 ized languages. 



