516 Evolution a7id Language 



done. More than once there has been danger of the study following 

 erroneous paths. Its terminology and its point of view have in some 

 degi'ee changed. But nothing can shake the truth of the statement 

 that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family 

 sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, 

 and dilFerentiated fi*om all other languages by formation, by vocabu- 

 lary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language 

 long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before 

 Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first 

 suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's Comparative 

 Grammar began to be published nine years before the first di'aft of 

 Darwin's treatise on the Origin of Species was put on paper in 1842. 



It is not therefore on the history of Comparative Philology in 

 general that the ideas of Darwin have had most influence. Un- 

 fortunately, as Jowett has said in the introduction to his translation 

 of Plato's Rcjyuhlic, most men live in a corner. The specialisation 

 of knowledge has many advantages, but it has also disadvantages, 

 none worse perhaps than that it tends to narrow the specialist's 

 horizon and to make it more difficult for one worker to follow the 

 advances that are being made by workers in other departments. No 

 longer is it possible as in earlier days for an intellectual prophet to 

 survey from a Pisgah height all the Promised Land. And the case 

 of linguistic research has been specially hard. This study has, if the 

 metaphor may be allowed, a very extended frontier. On one side it 

 touches the domain of literature, on other sides it is conterminous 

 with history, with ethnology and anthropology, with physiology in so 

 far as language is the production of the brain and tissues of a living 

 being, with physics in questions of pitch and stress accent, with 

 mental science in so far as the principles of similarity, contrast, and 

 contiguity affect the forms and the meanings of words through 

 association of ideas. The territory of linguistic study is immense, 

 and it has much to supply which might be useful to the neighbours 

 who border on that territory. But they have not regarded her even 

 with that interest which is called benevolent because it is not 

 actively maleficent. As Home Tooke remarked a century ago, Locke 

 had found a whole philosophy in language. What have the philoso- 

 phers done for language since ? Tlie disciples of Kant and of Wilhelm 

 von Humboldt supplied her plentifully with the sour gi-apes of 

 metaphysics ; otherwise her neighbours have left her severely alone 

 save for an occasional '*Ausffug," on which it was clear they had 

 sadly lost their bearings. Some articles in Psychological Journals, 

 Wundt's great work on VdlJier^JSi/cJioloffie^, and Mauthner's brilliantly 



^ Erster Band : Die Sprache, Leipzig, 1900. New edition, 1904. This work has been 

 fertile in producing both opponents and supporters. Delbriick, Grundfragen dcr Sprach- 



