EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



Aryan, in the time of the Spracheinhcit, we do 

 not know but A may have become obsolete 

 before B came into general use. So that, if we 

 were to try to write out a long story after Schlei- 

 cher's example, though each individual word 

 might be correctly reproduced, we should run 

 great risk of writing an Old Aryan style as 

 anomalous as would be the style of a writer of 

 hypothetical English who should mix up in one 

 and the same sentence the diction of Chaucer, 

 of Dryden, and of Longfellow. It is difficult, 

 at present, to see how chronological considera- 

 tions can be applied to the vocabulary of Old 

 Aryan, in the absence of that kind of historic 

 evidence which written records or inscriptions 

 alone can furnish. In the last resort, compara- 

 tive philology is an historical science. Though 

 it can, within a limited range, perform wonder- 

 ful feats of inference, quite comparable with 

 such as are achieved by the physical sciences, 

 yet after all, the tether by which it may stray 

 from its historic base is not a long one. The 

 science of language must always be studied 

 mainly by the help of documentary evidence. 



Yet while this chronological difficulty would 

 seem to render hopeless the accurate restitu- 

 tion of the Aryan mother tongue as a whole, 

 we can none the less restore or reconstruct in- 

 dividual Old Aryan words with a fair approach 

 to accuracy. And a very extensive Old Aryan 



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