THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTION. 11 



cessarily represent the ideas of savages only ; and they may 

 have been in the condition they were in, when first observed by 

 civilised man, not for a thousand but for thousands of years. 



It is not necessary, however, that a people should be 

 savages labouring under insuperable privations, in order that 

 language should be nearly stationary and of long endurance. 

 The Arabs of the age of Mahomed were barbarians, but not 

 savages. They were already in possession of a copious, and 

 therefore an ancient language, and the Koran is still considered 

 good Arabic, although written twelve centuries ago. Modern 

 Greek is known to differ from the Greek of the Homeric 

 poems only in the loss of a few inflections ; so that the dura- 

 tion of Greek may be reckoned at some threefold the length of 

 time theoretically allotted for duration of a living language. 



It is conquest by strangers alone that, by substituting their 

 own tongue for a native one, puts an end to a living language. 

 It by no means always does so even then. It has not done 

 so in certain parts of Britain, Ireland, France, and Spain ; and 

 there can be no good reason for not concluding that the native 

 languages now spoken in Ireland, in Wales, in Brittany and 

 in Galicia, may not have been the languages of the time of 

 the Roman conquests, or, indeed, that they may not even then 

 have been ancient languages — the primitive tongues of the 

 inevitable savages who first constructed them. The support, 

 then, which the theory of development receives from the his- 

 tory of language, we may safely conclude, is jDurely illusory. 



There is one argument against the theory of natural 

 development by variation which seems to me to be fatal to it. 

 This consists in the existence of the parasites of plants and 

 animals. These are of inferior organisation to the beings on 

 which and through which they live. They must, therefore, 

 have been either cotemporaneous or posterior creations to 

 the bodies to wliich they must owe their existence, and as 

 such, either equal or superior developments, instead of being 

 always inferior ones. Why is the misletoe or the fungus 

 of inferior organisation to the trees to which they owe their 



