NATURAL HISTOEY OF MAN. 503 



It is to this seeming chaos of tongues that the labours of 

 modern scholars and philologists have been earnestly di- 

 rected ; with the effect not only of better connecting and 

 classifying them, but with the higher result of giving to 

 the study of language the character of an especial science. 

 These labours, directed with infinite zeal and industry to 

 the examination of those common roots and forms which 

 denote a kindred origin, have succeeded in reducing under 

 three great divisions the Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian 

 almost all the Asiatic and European languages, whether now 

 extant, or known by record or writing only. Some do not 

 yet admit of such affiliation ; others, again, including most 

 of the African and native American dialects, have been so 

 imperfectly recorded (owing in part to the want of a true 

 phonetic system) that they have hardly yet had a place as- 

 signed to them among the genealogies of language. 



The conclusion, however, to which these researches conduct 

 us is the same already deduced from physiology, viz. that 

 Man is of one sole species, and derived from a single primi- 

 tive source on the earth. Were there more than one species, 

 and especially were one type really inferior in kind to 

 another, nothing would be so likely to attest this as the man- 

 ner of communication of thought and feeling. Language 

 itself would become the surest proof and interpreter of any 

 such diversity. But its actual varieties, only partially coin- 

 cident with the degree of civilisation and social advancement, 

 offer no lines of demarcation of this kind. However great 

 the differences (and these are ever multiplying, until checked 

 by the embodiment of speech in writing and literature), all 

 languages possess and manifest in their structure a common 

 relation to the uses or necessities of the same being.* 



* It is satisfactory to be able to quote the high authority of Max Miiller in 

 support of these views. He closes the volume of his Lectures, just published 

 (1862), by stating his opinion ' that no amount of variety in the materials or formal 

 elements of speech is incompatible with the admission of one common source.' 



