174 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



advanced by Dr. Hale. Imagine the case of a family 

 of Red Indians, father, mother, and half a dozen 

 children, in the vicissitudes of war, cut off from their 

 tribe. Suppose the father to be scalped and the 

 mother soon to die. The little ones left to themselves 

 in some lonely valley, living upon roots and herbs, 

 would converse for a time by using the few score 

 words they had heard from their parents. But as 

 they grew up they would require new words and 

 would therefore coin them. As they became a tribe 

 they would require more words, and so in time a Lan- 

 guage might arise, all the words expressive of the 

 simpler relations — father, mother, tent, fire — being 

 common to other Indian Languages, but all the later 

 words purely arbitrary and necessarily a standing 

 puzzle to philology. The curious thing is that this 

 theory is borne out by some most interesting geo- 

 graphical facts. " If, under such circumstances, dis- 

 ease, or the casualties of a hunter's life should carry 

 off the parents, the survival of the children would, it 

 is evident, depend mainly upon the nature of the 

 climate and the ease with which food could be pro- 

 cured at all seasons of the year. In ancient Europe, 

 after the present climatal conditions were established, 

 it is doubtful if a family of children under ten years 

 of age could have lived through a single winter. We 

 are not, therefore, surprised to find that no more than 

 four or five linguistic stocks are represented in 

 Europe. Of Nortli America, east of the Rocky Mount- 

 ains and north of the tropics, the same may be said. 

 The climate and the scarcity of food in winter forbid 

 us to suppose that a brood of orphan children could 

 have survived, except possibly, by a fortunate chance, 



