COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. 



239 



In now turning to this important branch of my subject, I 

 may remark in limine that, like all the sciences, philology can 

 be cultivated only by those who devote themselves specially 

 to the purpose. My function, therefore, will here be that of 

 merely putting together the main results of philological 

 research, so far as this has hitherto proceeded, and so far as 

 these results appear to me to have any bearing upon the 

 "origin of human faculty." Being thus myself obliged to 

 rely upon authority, where I find that authorities are in con- 

 flict — which, I need hardly say, is often the case — I will either 

 avoid the points of disagreement, or else state what has to be 

 said on both sides of the question. But where I find that all 

 competent authorities are in substantial agreement, I will not 

 burden my exposition by tautological quotations. 



Among the earlier students of language it was a moot 

 question whether the faculty had its origin in Divine inspira- 

 tion or in human invention. So long as the question touching 

 the origin of language was supposed to be restricted to one 

 or other of these alternatives, the special creationists in this 

 department of thought may be regarded as having had the 

 best of the argument. And this for the following reasons. 

 Their opponents, for the most part, were unfairly handicapped 

 by a general assumption of special creation as regards the 

 origin of man, and also by a general belief in the* confusion 

 of tongues at the Tower of Babel. The theory of evolution 

 having been as yet unformulated, there was an antecedent 

 presumption in favour of the Divine origin of speech, since it 

 appeared in the last degree improbable that Adam and Eve 

 should have been created "with full-summed powers" of 

 intellect, without the means of communicating their ideas to 

 one another. And even where scientific investigators were 

 not expressly dominated by acceptance of the biblical cosmo- 

 logy, many of them were nevertheless implicitly influenced by 

 it, to the extent of supposing that if language were not the 

 result of direct inspiration, it can only have been the result of 

 deliberate invention. But against this supposition of language 

 having been deliberately invented, it was easy for orthodox 



