July 1, 1886.] 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



285 



If the floors of the great seas ai-ound the Lunar Apennines 

 have been covered with matter washed from the lunar con- 

 tinents, we may look for the signs on thos3 floors, now that 

 the great dee|) has retired from them (to deeper depths), 

 for traces of the continents over which the waves of those 

 seas once rolled. Such signs, though they have been little 

 noticed, are clearly to be seen. There are the ghosts of 

 great craters — craters which once stood out above the conti- 

 nental tracts to which they belonged, but have now been 

 silted over until, like the forms of olyects buried beneath a 

 deep and level snowdrift, they show only through .some 

 slight difference in the texture of the sediment lying over 

 the raised parts of the hidden surface. These buried craters 

 were as large as any still outstanding. They tell us of 

 stages of the moon's vulcanian life earlier than those of 

 which the immense e.Ktant craters speak. And even these, 

 the mighty Tycho, 51: miles across and 12,000 feet deep, 

 Copernicus, 58 miles across, Kapler, Archimedes, Plato — 

 these speak of a stage of vulcanian activity such as once 

 existed on the earth, but of whose progress the material 

 records were destroyed millions of years ago. 



EVOLUTION OF L/^NGUAGE. 



By Ada 8. Ballin. 



-FAMIfJES: THEIR DIFFEIiENCES AND 

 SIMILARITIE.S. 



N concluding my last article, I spoke of the slow 

 growth of language as being due to the slow 

 development of mind and acquii-ement of new 

 ideas. In its early history the progress of lan- 

 guage must, however, have been infinitely slower 

 than at any later period, and its jirogress may 

 be compared to that of a stone fi^lling down 

 a well with an accelei-ating velocity, which is trebled in the 

 second second, multiplied by five in the third, by seven in the 

 fourth, and so on ; for, as I have already shown, the growth 

 of language is primarily dependent on that of ideas, while, 

 on the other hand, ideas are mainly developed by the use of 

 language. Hence it Ijecomes easy to understand how tardy 

 was the early development of ideas when we consider the prob- 

 ably ver}' imperfect language of primitive man. The human 

 contemporaries of the great mammoths whose remains are 

 found in the Post-Tertiary Drift, the men of the bone-caves, 

 of the shell-heaps, of the peat-bogs, and those of the ci'om- 

 lech periods and early lake <lwellings, must have lived for 

 untold ages in far greater barbarism than any that can come 

 beneath our ken. Progress must have crept on through 

 the centuries, though with gradually increasing velocity, but 

 tending always to a more coherent communal life, and con- 

 sequently to an increased need of the means of communi- 

 cation. One of our greatest thinkers has said : — " There 

 cannot be moiul relations apart from society. . . . The in- 

 tellect and the conscience are social functions. . . . The lan- 

 guage we think in and the conceptions we employ, the 

 attitudes of our minds and the means of investigation, are 

 social products determined by the activities of the collective 

 life. . . . We breathe the social air : since what we think 

 gi'eatly depends upon what others have thought," * and the 

 most importiint product of communal life, the moans by 

 which man influences and is influenced by man, the very 

 basis of society, is language. The gregarious nature of man- 



* G. H. Lewes's " Problems of Life and Mind," vol. i. p. 173. 



kind renders it an imperative necessity, and wherever primi- 

 tive men may have herded together, in however small 

 numbers, there language, whether of signs or sounds, most 

 probably both, must have sprung up — crude and limited 

 though it may have be^n, the earliest manifestation of the 

 "reat organ of civilisation was then called into exist- 

 ence. 



" Language," says Professor Sayce,* " was not created 

 until the several types of race had been fully fixed and deter- 

 mined. The Xauthocroid and the Melanocroid, the white 

 Albino, and the American C'opperskin existed with their 

 features already fixed and enduring before the first com- 

 munity evolved the infantile language of mankind," but this 

 seems open to the objection that it is too much to assume, 

 for, as I have shown, gregarious animals have means of 

 communication, and it would be unreasonable to maintain 

 that the earliest men were not on a higher level than their 

 four-footed contemporaries. 



There are many theories to account for the largely 

 different forms of language used by diflerent races, and as 

 many theories to account for certain similaiities among 

 them. In the first place, the differences have been quoted 

 by some writers to prove the distinct oiigin of races, while 

 others attributed the wide differences to phonetic changes 

 and to the early separation of the human family. In the 

 second place, the similarities can bo accounted for either as 

 evidence of the common origin of races or simply as a result 

 of the similarity of physiological construction, especially of 

 the vocal organs which permit of imitation of those sounds 

 of nature which are common to all time and locality. Take, 

 for example, the sound of the wind among leaves, running 

 water, the crackling, roaring, and hissing sounds of burning 

 materials, as well as the noises of animals and birds, and 

 many others. Prom this it follows that languages would 

 not necessarily be more varied than at present if each 

 family into which we classify them had been derived from 

 diflerent original parents, and there is every reason to 

 suppose that, as Sayce observes iu another place, " the 

 primitive languages of the earth were as infinitely numerous 

 as the communities that produced them." But numberless 

 communities have grown up and perished aud left not a 

 wrack behind, and it must have been the same with 

 languages. Not only- have languages perished with the 

 speakers, but they have also been supplanted by conquer- 

 ing tongues, and, in a manner, killed at the .sword's point. 

 Not many years have passed since the last Tasmanian died, 

 and with him the four Tasmanian dialects which our 

 colonists found on their arrival became extinct ; but, 

 although the Welsh and the Irish peoples are alive and 

 vigorous, their languages are dying out, supplanted by the 

 English tongue. 



Languages are classed in different families according a.s 

 they can be traced to the same stock. Thus we say that 

 English, French, German, and Hindustani all belong to the 

 Indo-European family, although to dift'erent branches of the 

 same ; that Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, are sister-tongues, for 

 they bear evidence of the strongest possible family relation- 

 ship. But there are languages which, to continue the 

 metaphor, are orphans and the only survivors of who'.e 

 families, large or small, that have become extinct. Such 

 are Etruscan, Basque, and the isolated languages of flu' 

 Caucasus that seem to have no relations or friends in Ih./ 

 world. 



According to Friedrich Miiller there are about a hundred 

 different families of languages in existence between which 

 no relationship has been established, although counth'.ss 

 eSbrts have been made in this direction ; and Sayce givis 



♦ "Introduction to the Science of Language," vol. ii. p. 318. 



