386 THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONTINUED. 



speech of the physician, who tells those educated like him- 

 self the particular composition of the medicine, and the par- 

 ticular disorder for which he has prescribed it; we have 

 vividly brought home to us, the precision which language 

 gains by the multiplication of terms. 



Again, in the course of its evolution, each tongue ac- 

 quires a further accuracy through processes which fix the 

 meaning of each word. Intellectual intercourse slowly di- 

 minishes laxity of expression. By and by dictionaries give 

 definitions. And eventually, among the most cultivated, in- 

 definiteness is not tolerated, either in the terms used or in 

 their grammatical combinations. 



Once more, languages considered as wholes, become 

 gradually more sharply marked off from one another, and 

 from their common parent: as witness in early times the 

 divergence from the same root of two languages so unlike 

 as Greek and Latin, and in later times the development of 

 three Latin dialects into Italian, French, and Spanish. 



136. In his " History of the Inductive Sciences," Dr. 

 Whewell says that the Greeks failed in physical philosophy 

 because their " ideas were not distinct, and apropriate to 

 the facts." I do not quote this remark for its luminous- 

 ness; since it would be equally proper to ascribe the in- 

 distinctness and inappropriateness of their ideas to the im- 

 perfection of their physical philosophy; but I quote it 

 because it serves as good evidence of the indefiniteness of 

 primitive science. The same work and its fellow on " The 

 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences/ 7 supply other evi- 

 dences equally good, because equally independent of any 

 such hypothesis as is here to be established. ' Respecting 

 mathematics, we have the fact that geometrical theorems 

 grew out of empirical methods; and that these theorems, at 

 first isolated, did not acquire the clearness which complete 

 demonstration gives, until they were arranged by Euclid 

 into a series of dependent propositions. At a later period, 



