LANDGRAVE. 



LANGUAGE. 



S3 



annual value, as rated at the time of imposition. Consequently the 

 produce varies but little, ranging between 1,100,OOW. and 1,200,OOOZ. 

 For the year ending March 31, 1859, it was 1,100,08H. for England, 

 Wales, and Scotland. Ireland is exempt. 



LANDGRAVE. In the early history of Germany the 'Grave was an 

 inferior judge, who was chosen by the people for his experience in 

 business. Under the Franks the Graves were no longer chosen by the 

 people, but appointed by the kings or emperors, and were judges of a 

 province ; above them in rank were the Herzogs, or dukes ; and below 

 them the Gaugrafs, or judges of a district (called a Oau) a division of 

 which there are still some traces in Germany, as the Rheingau and the 

 Vinschgau, in which they exercised the rights of government in the 

 king's name, having especially the administration of justice, the police, 

 and the royal revenues. After the time of the Carlovingian kings the 

 following classes were distinguished : Pabjravet (Pfalzgraf, from pfalz, 

 court), who sat in judgment at the king's court, and examined whether 

 a suit must be decided by the king himself; Margrava (properly 

 Martyraea, Markgraf ), from mart-, a frontier or boundary, who were 

 keepers of the frontiers (lords of the marches) ; and Landyravet. Nearly 

 all these titularies, however, soon made themselves independent of the 

 sovereign. The Markgraves of Thiiringen assumed the title of Land- 

 graves towards the end of the llth century, and it was obtained in the 

 next century by the Graves of Hesse, in whose dominions the title is 

 still borne by the Landgraf of Hesse Homburg, while the two elder 

 branches have assumed the titles the senior that of Elector of Hesse 

 Cassel, the second that of Grand Duke of Hesse Darmstadt. 



LANDING-STAGE, a structure erected upon the banks of a river, 

 quay, or dock, for the purpose of facilitating the discharge of goods, or 

 the landing of passengers, from the vessels frequenting the particular 

 port or locality under consideration. Landing-stages under these cir- 

 cumstances may either be fixed, as hi the majority of docks, where 

 they are provided with hand, steam, or hydraulic cranes, or with other 

 machinery for facilitating the operations of unloading ; or they may be 

 floating, as in the various passenger stations upon the Thames, or upon 

 the Mersey, Frith of Forth, &c. The variable conditions of the loads 

 to be discharged, hi the first case, and of the rise of tide, or of the 

 variations of the surface lines in the second, introduce such countless 

 i -i into the details of landing stages, that it becomes im- 

 possible to lay down any general rule with res|>ect to them ; it may 

 suffice, therefore, to refer to the landing stages at Liverpool ; at 

 Blackfriars Bridge, London ; at the Albert Docks, Liverpool, the 

 Regent's Canal Docks, and the Victoria Docks, as illustrations of this 

 class of structures in some of its more striking modifications. In 

 passenger-landing stages there should be provision made for booking, 

 and fur checking the arrival of travellers ; and in goods lauding stages 

 -hould be ample means for weighing, measuring, sampling, or 

 packing the goods ; in both of them, the vessels to be unloaded should 

 be able to lie out of the ordina'ry course of the ships frequenting the 

 particular place, and be able to cast off easily into the open water when 

 required. The Brighton chain pier, and the landing stage of a some- 

 what similar character erected by the late Sir I. Brunei at the island 

 of Bourbon, may be referred to as amongst the most remarkable 

 landing stages on exposed coasts. 



LANDING-WAITER, an officer of the customs, whose duties consist 

 in taking an accurate account of the number, weight, measure, or quality 

 of the various descriptions of merchandise landed from foreign countries 

 or colonial possessions. Landing-waiters likewise attend to the ship- 

 ment of all goods in respect of which bounties or drawbacks are 



I . These officers are likewise called searchers. 

 LANDLORD AND TENANT. [TENANT AND LANDLOBD.] 

 LAXDSCAl'E GARDENING. [GARDEN.] 



LANGUAGE, taken in its most general sense, may be denned as the 

 means by which the thoughts of one mind are conveyed to another 

 niinil; and it may be assumed, as a self-evident proposition, that 

 the channel must be one or more of the senses. Of these the most 

 available are of course the sight and hearing, but not to the exclusion 

 of the others. Thus the sense of smell is turned to account when the 

 blood-hound is employed to track a fugitive, but the materials at hand 

 for action on the nostrils, the cupta narium, must needs be limited, 

 nor would any reference to this sense, or that of taste, have been made 

 on the present occasion but that it is always desirable in an inquiry, 

 to cast a look, however transient, over the whole field. While visible 

 language is employed chiefly for the purpose of recording knowledge, 

 there are cases where it is needed for immediate use. Thus, to take 

 the pase of the deaf man in the farce of ' Boots at the Swan,' a series 

 of inefficient attempts on the part of a traveller to procure refreshments 

 by verbal orders, when followed by a few movements of the hands, as 

 of cutting food in a plate and conveying it to the lips. The captain 

 again on the bridge of a steamboat, amid the noise of passengers and 

 weather, by previously concerted movements, conveys his orders either 

 to the boy above the engine or to the sailor at the helm. In those sad, 

 but happily rare, cases, where the channels of the eye and ear are both 

 I . time wu when the unhappy sufferer was left to a life of worse 

 ih:iu lirutal torpidity ; but by modem science the sense of touch alone 

 en made to supply in some measure the deficiency, as in the 

 well known case of Laura Bridgman. The language then of the eye 

 and the ear need alone claim our attention. Some remarks on the 

 comparative advantages of these two forma of language have already 



been given in a previous article [ALPHABET]. It may be sufficient on 

 this head to notice the not unimportant fact, that it may often be 

 advantageous to call the visible in aid of the oral language. Thus a 

 shrug of the shoulders, a stamping of the foot, and movement of the 

 hand in various ways, often add much to the intelligibility of a 

 speaker. 



In an endeavour to find out the origin of oral language, an inquirer 

 is met by difficulties some imaginary, some real. That the task is no 

 easy one is seen at once in the fact that historical aid c in be of little 

 value, inasmuch as, from the nature of the case, written language 

 belongs to a much higher civilisation than that which was contented 

 with the language of sounds. On the other hand, little weight need be 

 given to the doctrine occasionally put forward, that the attempt in 

 itself savours of impiety, especially when the invention is ascribed to 

 man's own efforts under the stimulus of the wants which social life 

 brings with it. The Book of Genesis, it is now admitted by our best 

 informed divines, was not written to form a code of science ; yet, taken 

 in its most literal sense, the Mosaic account, instead of justifying the 

 assertion of a living writer, that God gave man language, expressly 

 ascribes the immediate invention to Adam. The most scrupulous 

 theologian therefore, will have no reason to quarrel with the views 

 about to be put forward. Others again treat the problem as one 

 insoluble for us. " How this latent power evolved itself first," says 

 the writer already alluded to, "how this spontaneous generation of 

 language came to pass, is a mystery, and as a mystery all the deepest 

 inquirers into the subject are content to leave it." Let us hope that 

 an attempt to throw a wet blanket on the inquiry will not be successful. 

 In all departments of knowledge, " the impossible " has again and again 

 been accomplished, and the solution has usually been effected by the 

 establishment of principles not more remarkable for power than for 

 simplicity. We think it the more important to urge this law of sim- 

 plicity, as marking all just explanations of natural phenomena, because 

 a certain love of the mystical has induced some modern writers to 

 shut their eyes to what is really most simple in the present inquiry. 

 The same writer, who has many claims on public attention, while he 

 admits that man has adorned and enriched his life with various arts 

 and inventions, objects to the theory that in like manner he invented 

 language. To the doctrine, that from rude and imperfect beginnings, 

 the inarticulate cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the 

 sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression of natural 

 objects upon him, man by little and little arrived at that wondrous 

 organ of thought and feeling which he now possesses, he opposes 

 the objection that language would then be an accident of human 

 nature, forgetting that it is one of those accidents which must have 

 occurred, so that chance at once merges in certainty. Moreover, what 

 valuable and permanent results may come out of mere accident, has 

 been shown of late in the highly philosophical doctrine of " Natural 

 Selection " in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. 



1 1 was long contended that the significancy attached to sounds was 

 altogether conventional. Thus the author of 'Hermes' (314) says : 

 " The meaning of language is derived from compact." No doubt this 

 theory of arbitrary signs is in itself thoroughly intelligible. The 

 signal-flags of a fleet, the oscillations of the needles in a telegraph office, 

 owe their value entirely to a previous understanding ; but the explana- 

 tion is utterly without solidity for oral language, inasmuch as we 

 cannot easily imagine a man possessed of sufficient authority to dictate 

 such arbitrary laws, or able to make known his wishes. Add to this 

 the consideration that the absence of all natural connection between 

 the significant sound and the thing signified, would render it the more 

 difficult both to acquire and to retain a language so constituted. The 

 theory then that would found language on the assumption of a com- 

 pact, may be left to share the fate of other similar theories, such as 

 Rousseau's ' Contrat Social.' On the other hand it is now all but 

 universally admitted that some portion of language at any rate, owes 

 its origin to an imitation of the sounds that occur in nature. The 

 moo-cow, the baa-lamb of the child, the cuckoo, the peewit, the wftijt-poor~ 

 icill , the tuco-tuco, are simple but irresistible examples of this law ; 

 and we have the same principle presented in the dialogue over the 

 Chinese banquet, when, as the tale goes, an English visitor endeavoured 

 to extract from the native waiter a little information as to the dish he 

 was eating by the inquiring words " quack quack, eh ? " and received 

 the more intelligible than welcome answer of " bow-wow ! " But if 

 the imitation of actual sounds admittedly supplied one part of language, 

 is it an overbold supposition that all language came from this source ? 

 Not that it is to be expected that in each individual case we should 

 succeed in tracing up the meaning of a word to its onomatopoetic 

 progenitor, for words are incessantly modifying their meaning, and the 

 principle of association by which this result is effected, is of ten difficult 

 to follow. No better proof of this difficulty is to be found than iu 

 the fact that the same word has occasionally obtained meanings 

 diametrically opposed to each other. Thus. the Latin noun species, lit. 

 ' sight,' is at one time employed to denote what a person cew to him- 

 self to see, and thus we have a clafu of meanings denoting what is 

 utterly unreal, just aa our language owes to the same stock its nouns 

 tpeciotu and spectre. At other times it has meanings in keeping with 

 the doctrine that " seeing is believing," and it is in this way that wo 

 have in use the terms epecie, "solid bullion," as opposed to paper 

 money, and spice, which at one time vied with gold itself in value. 



