COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. 25/ 



types of language-formation upon which the earh'est materials 

 of speech were moulded. For even the strongest advocates 

 of the polysynthetic origin of speech do not venture to 

 question the highly primitive nature of the monosyllabic 

 type. Thus, for instance, Professor Sayce is the principal 

 upholder of the polysynthetic view, and yet he quotes the 

 isolating forms of Chinese and Taic as furnishing " excellent 

 illustrations of the early days of speech ; " * and he adduces 

 them as " examples from the far East to show us the way in 

 which our words first came into existence." f But if this is 

 allowed to be so even by the leading advocate of the poly- 

 synthetic view, I cannot conceive the possibility of the one 

 type having become so completely transformed into the other 

 as to have left no trace in the isolating type of its poly- 

 synthetic origin. For, in view of the above admissions, we 

 are left to conclude that the transformation must have taken 

 place soon after the birth of language in any form — notwith- 

 standing that, as Professor Sayce elsewhere insists (in the 

 passage already quoted), " the conception of the sentence 

 which underlies the polysynthetic dialects is the precise 

 converse of that which underlies the isolating or the 

 agglutinative type." 



In view of these statements, therefore, by Professor Sayce 

 himself, I do not think it is necessary for me to go further in 

 justification of the opinion already expressed — namely, that 

 we must recognize at least two types of language-formation 

 upon which the earliest materials of speech were moulded. 

 It is probable enough that both these types of language- 

 formation were independently originated in many parts of 

 the earth's surface at different times ; and it is possible that 

 yet other types may have arisen, which are now either 

 extinct, or fused with some of the later developments of the 

 two which have survived. But, be these things as they may, 

 I believe that both the schools of philology which we are 

 considering have made out their respective cases ; and, there- 



• Introduction y ^c.^ i. 120. 

 t Ibid., i. ii6. 



