CHAP. XXIII. RACES CHANGE MORE SLOAVLY 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, 

 therefore, who is contending that all living languages are de- 

 rivative and not primordial, has a great advantage over a 

 naturalist who is endeavoring to inculcate a similar theory in 

 regard to sjiecies. 



It may not be uninstructive, in order fairly to ap]3reciate 

 the vast difficulty of the task of those Avho advocate trans- 

 mutation in natural historj^, to consider how hard it wonld 

 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 forever. 



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 naturallj" 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 Germans and 

 French. What evidence is there of such incessant variation 

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



