SPECIAL CREATION OR DERIVATION? 



case as in the other ; for Teutonic and Romance 

 began as the northern and southern dialects of 

 the same Old Aryan language. In similar wise 

 we may say that, even with the keenest linguis- 

 tic instinct, it would be difficult to decipher a 

 line of modern Persian by reason of its kinship 

 with modern Greek ; while yet it is undeniable 

 that the Persian spoken by the officers of Xerxes 

 was strikingly similar to the Greek spoken by 

 Demaratos and Leonidas. 



In citing this example from the phenomena 

 of language, I do not cite it as direct testimony 

 in favour of the theory of derivation in biology. 

 Because tear and larme can be traced back to a 

 common form, it does not follow that the pig 

 and the horse have a common ancestor. Yet, 

 while the linguistic parallel is by no means avail- 

 able as direct testimony in a biological question, 

 it has nevertheless a logical value so important 

 that zoologists as eminent as Haeckel and phi- 

 lologists as profound as Schleicher have not 

 failed to insist upon it. What we see exempli- 

 fied in these linguistic phenomena is the way in 

 which a classification must be framed in all cases 

 where we have to express complex genetic relation- 

 ships. We see that where a multitude of objects 

 are associated by a common genesis, we cannot 

 classify them in a linear series, but only in groups 

 and sub-groups, diverging from a common trunk, 

 like the branches and twigs of what we very aptly 



TOL. II. 3 5 



