444 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. it. 



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 deter- 

 mined by certain phonetic conditions, which have been so 

 thoroughly generalized, that philologists can now occasionally 

 reconstruct extinct words, after a fashion somewhat similar 

 to that in which Prof. Huxley would, I presume, reconstruct 

 an extinct animal upon seeing one of its fossilized bones or 

 teeth. 



But what now chiefly concerns us is the fact that all 

 existing Aryan languages are the modified descendants of a 

 common progenitor. Bearing this in mind, let us note sundry 

 features of the classification of these languages. In the first 

 place, it is impossible to arrange them in any linear series 

 which will truly represent their relations to each other. In 

 some respects Sanskrit is nearest the original type, in other 

 respects it is Lithuanian which shows the least departure, in 

 other respects it is Old Irish, and in yet others it is Latin. 

 Even if we decide to make a compromise, and. to begin with 

 Sanskrit, as being on the whole the least modified of these 

 languages, we cannot stir many steps without getting into 

 difficulties. Suppose we say Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Old Irish, 

 Latin, Old Slavic, Zend, Greek, Gothic, Old German. See 

 now what we have been doing ! We have indeed got Old 

 Irish and Latin close together, as they ought to be, and we 

 have done right in putting Gothic and Old German side by 

 side; but we have been obliged to thrust in half a dozen 

 languages between Sanskrit and Zend, and between Latin 

 and Greek there is a similar unseemly divorce. When we 

 come to take in the later dialects, the confusion becomes still 

 more hopeless. If after Sanskrit we put in Prakrit and Pali, 

 Urdu and Bengali, and a dozen other derivatives, we must 

 then jump back to Latin, for instance, and after following 



