32 EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 



occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, 

 often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to 

 the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant 

 progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others 

 can just master a whole sentence, and those still further 

 advanced, romping and playing together, the children of 

 nature, through the live-long day, become habituated te a 

 language of their own. The more voluble condescend to the 

 less precocious, and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a 

 dialect composed of a host of mongrel words and phrases, 

 joined together without rule, and in the course of a generation 

 the entire character of the language is changed.'" ( y4 ) I have 

 been told, that in like manner the children of the Manchester 

 factory workers, left for a great part of the day, in large 

 assemblages, under the care of perhaps a single elderly 

 person, and spending the time in amusements, are found to 

 make a great deal of new language. I have seen children in 

 other circumstances amuse themselves by concocting and 

 throwing into the family circulation entirely new words ; and 

 I believe I am running little risk of contradiction when I say 

 that there is scarcely a family, even amongst the middle 

 classes of this country, who have not some peculiarities of 

 pronunciation and syntax, which have originated amongst 

 themselves, it is hardly possible to say how. All these things 

 being considered, it is easy to understand how mankind have 

 come at length to possess between three and four thousand 

 languages, all different at least as much as French, German, 

 and English, though, as has been shown, resemblances sug- 

 gesting a common origin are observable in most of them. 



What has been said on the question whether mankind were 

 originally barbarous or civilized, will have prepared the 

 reader for understanding how the arts and sciences, and the 

 rudiments of civilization itself, took their rise amongst men. 

 The only source of fallacious views on this subject is the so 

 frequent observation of arts, sciences, and social modes, forms, 

 and ideas, being not indigenous where we see them now 

 flourishing, but known to have been derived elsewhere : thus 

 Rome borrowed from Greece, Greece from Egypt, and Egypt 



