EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



into Persia and India, and other branches into 

 Greece, Italy, Germany, Gaul, and Britain, we 

 come upon the same linguistic phenomena which 

 we observed above in the mediaeval history of 

 Latin. With the isolation of the various tribes, 

 separated from each other by wide distances, 

 we see the Aryan mother tongue break up into 

 innumerable dialectic forms ; until, by and by, 

 with the rise of new and distinct centres of social 

 life, new and distinct languages come upon the 

 scene, and acquire literary immortality in the 

 Vedas, in the Avesta, in the epics of Homer 

 and Virgil, in the novels of Cervantes and 

 Turgenief, in the sermons of Bossuet and Tay- 

 lor, in the dramas of Shakespeare and Goethe, 

 and in that palladium of linguistic stability in 

 the future, the English version of the Bible. 

 In such cases as these, where a single durable 

 mother language has produced several durable 

 offspring, the signs of kinship, whether in gram- 

 mar or in vocabulary, are never obliterated. 

 After an independent career of more than ten 

 centuries, the genetic relationship of French and 

 Italian is a perfectly patent fact, about which 

 there could be no question whatever, even if all 

 memory of the Roman Empire had lapsed from 

 men's minds, even if some fanatical Cardinal 

 Ximenes had burned in a bonfire every scrap of 

 French and Italian literature that ever existed. 

 After an independent career of not less than forty 

 148 



