CHAP. XXIII. THEIR ORIGIN A MYSTERY. 469 



spoken by a bigbly civilized nation, and discover that the gram- 

 matical rules and the inflections v^'hich denote number, time, 

 and quality are usually the product of a rude state of society, — 

 that the savage and the sage, the peasant and man of letters, 

 the child and the philosopher, have worked together, in the 

 course of many generations, to build up a fabric which has 

 been truly described as a wonderful instrument of thought, a 

 machine the several parts of which are so well adjusted to 

 each other as to resemble the product of one period and of 

 a single mind, — we cannot but look upon the result as a 

 profound mystery, and one of which the separate builders 

 have been almost as unconscious as are the bees in a hive of 

 the architectural skill and mathematical knowledge which 

 are displayed in the construction of the honeycomb. 



In our attempts to account for the origin of species, we 

 find ourselves still sooner brought face to face with the 

 woi'king of a law of development of so high an order as to 

 stand nearly in the same relation as the Deity himself to 

 man's finite understanding, a law capable of adding new and 

 powerful causes, such as the moral and intellectual faculties 

 of the human race, to a system of nature which had gone on 

 for millions of years without the intervention of any analogous 

 cause. If we confound "Variation" or "Natural Selection" 

 with such creational laws, we deify secondary causes or 

 immeasurably exaggerate their influence. 



Yet we ought by no means to undervalue the importance 

 of the step which will have been made, should it ever become 

 highly probable that the past changes of the organic world 

 have been brought about by the subordinate agency of such 

 causes as "Variation" and "Natural Selection." All our 

 advances in the knowledge of Nature have donsisted of such 

 steps as these, and we must not be discouraged because 

 greater mysteries remain behind wholly inscrutable to us. 



If the philologist is asked whether in the beginning of things 



