CHAP. XXITT. ONCE LOST, CAN NEVER BE REVIVED. 467 



to sudden extinction. They may die out very gradually in 

 consequence of transmutation, or abruptly by the extermi 

 nation of the last surviving representatives of the unaltered 

 type. We know in what century the last Dodo perished, 

 and we know that in the seventeenth century the language 

 of the Red Indians of Massachusetts, into which Father 

 Eliot had translated the Bible, and in which Christianity 

 was preached for several generations, ceased to exist, the last 

 individuals by whom it was spoken having at that period 

 died without issue.* But if just before that event the white 

 man had retreated from the continent, or had been swept off 

 by an epidemic, those Indians might soon have repeopled 

 the wilderness, and their copious vocabulary and peculiar 

 forms of expression might have lasted without important 

 modification to this day. The extinction, however, of lan 

 guages in general is not abrupt, any more than that of 

 species. It will also be evident from what has been said, 

 that a language which has once died out can never be 

 revived, since the same assemblage of conditions can never 

 be restored even among the descendants of the same stock, 

 much less simultaneously among all the surrounding nations 

 with whom they may be in contact. 



We may compare the persistency of languages, or the 

 tendency of each generation to adopt without change the 

 vocabulary of its predecessor, to the force of inheritance in 

 the organic world, which causes the offspring to resemble its 

 parents. The inventive power which coins new words or 

 modifies old ones, and adapts them to new wants and con 

 ditions as often as these arise, answers to the variety-making 

 power in the animate creation. 



Progressive improvement in language is a necessary con 

 sequence of the progress of the human mind from one gene 

 ration to another. As civilisation advances, a greater number 

 * Lyell, Travels in North America, vol. i, p. 260. 1845. 



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