COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



munication, and the growth of large centres of 

 population, and commercial as weH as literary 

 activity, end by making the inhabitants of all 

 parts of the country speak and write more and 

 more Hke those of its intellectual metropolis. 

 And in this way the intermediate dialects slowly 

 disappear, leaving two languages with thor- 

 oughly distinct individualities, like Italian and 

 French." ^ Now even here, as I go on to show, 

 the relationships among the dialects have be- 

 come sufficiently obscured — owing to disap- 

 pearance of connecting links — to allow M. 

 Raynouard to maintain the paradox that the 

 modern Romanic languages are descended, not 

 directly from the Latin, but from the old Pro- 

 ven9al. And in such countries as Hindustan, 

 the processes of divergence, and accompanying 

 obliteration, have gone on to such an extent that 

 Bengali has been mistaken for a non- Aryan lan- 

 guage. 



Here in the domain of language we see that 

 competition is most severe and destructive be- 

 tween closely allied forms, and that the extremes 

 will vigorously flourish long after the short- 

 lived means have been crushed out of existence. 

 The maxim In medio tutissimus ibis does not 

 apply to such cases. We have now to observe 

 that among the phenomena which natural his- 



^ ** The Genesis of Language,** North American Review ^ 

 October, 1869, pp. 334* 335- 

 50 



