SPECIAL CREATION OR DERIVATION? 



sified. Like the sciences of zoology and botany, 

 the science of philology is preeminently a clas- 

 sificatory science, using the method of compari- 

 son as its chief implement of inductive research. 

 And philology, at least so far as the study of the 

 Aryan language is concerned, has been carried 

 to such a high degree of scientific perfection, 

 as regards the accuracy of its processes and the 

 certainty of its results, that we may safely gather 

 from it such illustrations as suit our present 

 purpose. 



The various Aryan or Indo-European lan- 

 guages are demonstrably descended from a single 

 ancestral language, in the same sense in which 

 the various modern Romanic languages are all 

 descended from the vulgar Latin of the West- 

 ern Empire. By slow dialectic variations in 

 pronunciation, and in the use of syntactical de- 

 vices for building up sentences, these languages 

 have been imperceptibly differentiated from a 

 single primeval language, until they are now so 

 unlike that not one of them is intelligible, save 

 after careful study, to the speakers of another. 

 The minute variations, of which the cumulative 

 result is this manifold unlikeness, have not pro- 

 ceeded at haphazard ; but they have all along 

 been determined by certain phonetic conditions, 

 which have been so thoroughly generalized that 

 philologists can now occasionally reconstruct 

 extinct words, after a fashion somewhat similar 



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