464 STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE, CAUSES OF SELECTION. CHAP. xxm. 



get the better of provincialisms and local dialects. Between 

 these dialects, which may be regarded as so many ' incipient 

 languages,' the competition is always keenest when they are 

 most nearly allied, and the extinction of any one of them 

 destroys some of the links by which a dominant tongue may 

 have been previously connected with some other widely distinct 

 one. It is by the perpetual loss of such intermediate forms 

 of speech that the great dissimilarity of the languages which 

 survive is brought about. Thus, if Dutch should become a 

 dead language, English and German would be separated by 

 a wider gap. 



Some languages which are spoken by millions, and spread 

 over a wide area, will endure much longer than others which 

 have never had a wide range, especially if the tendency to 

 incessant change in one of these dominant tongues is arrested 

 for a time by a standard literature. But even this source of 

 stability is insecure, for popular writers themselves are great 

 innovators, sometimes coining new words, and still oftener 

 new expressions and idioms, to embody their own original 

 conceptions and sentiments, or some peculiar modes of 

 thought and feeling characteristic of their age. Even when 

 a language is regarded with superstitious veneration as the 

 vehicle of divine truths and religious precepts, and which has 

 prevailed for many generations, it will be incapable of per 

 manently maintaining its ground. Hebrew had ceased to be 

 a living language before the Christian era. Sanscrit, the 

 sacred language of the Hindoos, shared the same fate, in 

 spite of the veneration in which the Vedas are still held, and 

 in spite of many a Sanscrit poem once popular and national. 



The Christians of Constantinople and the Morea still hear 

 the New Testament and their liturgy read in ancient Greek, 

 while they speak a dialect in which Paul might have preached 

 in vain at Athens. So in the Eoman Catholic Church, the 

 Italians pray in one tongue and talk another. Luther's trans- 



