CHAP. xxm. RACES CHANGE MORE SLOWLY THAN LANGUAGES. 457 



of departure, they would converge and meet sooner in some 

 era of the past than would the existing races of mankind ; 

 in other words, races change much more slowly than lan 

 guages. But, according to the doctrine of transmutation, to 

 form a new species would take an incomparably longer 

 period than to form a new race. No language seems ever 

 to last for a thousand years, whereas many a species seems to 

 have endured for hundreds of thousands. A philologist, there 

 fore, who is contending that all living languages are derivative 

 and not primordial, has a great advantage over a naturalist 

 who is endeavouring to inculcate a similar theory in regard 

 to species. 



It may not be uninstructive, in order fairly to appreciate 

 the vast difficulty of the task of those who advocate trans 

 mutation in natural history, to consider how hard it would 

 be even for a philologist to succeed, if he should try to 

 convince an assemblage of intelligent but illiterate persons 

 that the language spoken by them, and all those talked by 

 contemporary nations, were modern inventions, moreover 

 that these same forms of speech were still constantly under 

 going change, and none of them destined to last for ever. 



We will suppose him to begin by stating his conviction, 

 that the living languages have been gradually derived from 

 others now extinct, and spoken by nations which had imme 

 diately preceded them in the order of time, and that those 

 again had used forms of speech derived from still older ones. 

 They might naturally exclaim, ( How strange it is that you 

 should find records of a multitude of dead languages, that a 

 part of the human economy which in our own time is so 

 remarkable for its stability, should have been so inconstant in 

 bygone ages ! We all speak as our parents and grandparents 

 spoke before us, and so, we are told, do the Grermans and 

 French. What evidence is there of such incessant variation 

 in remoter times ? and, if it be true, why not imagine that 



