NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 215 



Australia and the islands of the western portion of the 

 Pacific. This family, however, bears such an affinity to 

 that next to be described, that Dr. Leyden and some others 

 do not give it a distinct place as a family of languages. 



The fifth family is the Chinese, embracing a large 

 part of China, and most of the regions of Central and 

 Northern Asia. The leading features of the Chinese 

 language are, its consisting altogether of monosyllables, I 



and being destitute of all grammatical forms, except ! 



certain arrangements and accentuations, Avhich vary the 

 sense of particular words. It is also deficient in some of 

 the consonants most conspicuous in other languages, b, d, 

 r, v, and z ; so that this people can scarcely pronounce 

 our speech in such a way as to be intelligible : for 

 example, the word Christus they call Kuliss-ut-00-suh. 

 The Chinese, strange to say, though they early attained 

 to a remarkable degree of ci\dlisation, and have preceded 

 the Europeans in many of the most important inventions, 

 have a language which resembles that of children, or 

 deaf and dumb people. The sentence of short, simple, 

 unconnected words, in which an infant amongst us 

 attempts to express some of its wants and its ideas — the 

 equally broken and difficult terms which the deaf and 

 dumb express by signs, as tho following passage of the 

 Lord's Prayer : — " Our Father, heaven in, wish your 

 name respect, wish your soul's kingdom providence 

 arrive, wish your will do heaven earth equality," &c. 

 — these are like the discourse of the refined people of 

 the so-called Celestial Empire. An attempt was made 

 by the Abbe Sicard to teach the deaf and dumb gram- 

 matical signs J but they persisted in restricting themselves 

 to the simple signs of ideas, leaving the structure un- 

 determined by any but the natural order of connexion. 

 Such is exactly the condition of the Chinese language. 



