DIVISIONS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. xlix 



But all over the north of Europe, the relics are found of 

 people assuredly anterior to the Celtse, who used stone- 

 hatchets and flint-headed arrows, inferring a condition en- 

 tirely savage. Now, when we compare languages as the 

 proof of a common descent amongst tribes and nations, we 

 must, in order to make our argument worth anything, com- 

 pare the languages of people in the first ages, all the traces 

 of whose speech we may suppose to have perished with the 

 people themselves. When we compare the languages of a 

 posterior era, after unknown periods of war. colonization, 

 and the mixture of races, we may prove the connexion esta- 

 blished between countries and their inhabitants, but cer- 

 tainly not the pristine relation of the first people with one 

 another, or with any common stem. Thus a race of men, 

 we have seen, is assumed to have extended from the ancient 

 Aria, southward into the plains of India, and northward 

 into the wilds of Scythia, the manifest traces of whose lan- 

 guage, the Sanscrit, are found in the speech of the Teutons 

 of the north, of the Greeks of the west, of the Indians of 

 the south. This proves the relation between the members 

 of this people, but not the relations between races who, for 

 anything we know, may have previously inhabited the same 

 countries long before written speech was known. It is no- 

 thing strange that there should be analogies in the language 

 of different countries, when we consider that, beyond any re- 

 cords of history and tradition, tribes and nations have been 

 engaged in endless migrations and strife, exterminating or 

 mingling with one another ; and that within the period called 

 historical, empires have been formed, embracing large sec- 

 tions of the whole human family. Further, all men have 

 the like faculties and organs of speech, and it is not possible 

 that there should not be analogies in the structure of lan- 

 guages, even of the most distant and divergent tribes, and 

 even similarity of words derived from the same natural 

 sounds. But when we consider the faint similitudes which all 

 the unsparing labour of philologists has been able to trace 



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