EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



ing, while the extreme regularity of their recur- 

 rence is explicable only as the result of common 

 processes operating on common materials. 



The symmetry of consonant-changes through- 

 out the Aryan languages is at first sight a won- 

 derful phenomenon, and the tracing of corre- 

 lated words in accordance with such laws as 

 Grimm's never ceases to be a fascinating study. 

 The laws of vowel-change whereby, for ex- 

 ample, the Skr. matar corresponds to Lat. 

 mater, Gr. (jLTJrrjp, Gaelic mat hair , Germ. mut- 

 ter, and Kng. mother are hardly less interest- 

 ing. But to do justice to such a subject as 

 etymology would require much more time than 

 we have at our disposal. In the present paper 

 I have not attempted to make anything like a 

 full statement even of Grimm's law, but have 

 given only such scanty illustrations as may 

 serve to render the outline of the argument 

 intelligible while I go on to point out one of 

 the largest of the results that have come from 

 this minute study of consonants and vowels. 

 From this minute study the laws of the permu- 

 tation of words have been wrought into such a 

 complete and harmonious system that it has 

 become possible to reconstruct large portions of 

 the common Aryan mother tongue by compar- 

 ing together the curiously modified forms of 

 its modern descendants. The problem is quite 

 similar to what it would be if classical Latin were 

 108 



