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is in the hands of scientific men : objective methods of re- 

 search are employed and metaphysic disquisitions find no 

 place in the accepted philosophies; but to a large extent 

 philology remains in the hands of the metaphysicians, and 

 subjective methods of thought are used in the explanation 

 of the phenomena observed. If philology is to be a science 

 it must have an objective philosophy composed of a homo- 

 logic classification and orderly arrangement of the phe- 

 nomena of the languages of the globe. 



Philologic research began with the definite purpose in 

 view to discover in the diversities of language among the 

 peoples of the earth a common element from which they 

 were all supposed to have been derived, an original speech, 

 the parent of all languages. In this philologists had great 

 hopes of success at one time, encouraged by the discovery of 

 the relation between the diverse branches of the Aryan 

 stock, but in this very work methods of research were devel- 

 oped and doctrines established by which unexpected results 

 were reached. 



Instead of relegating the languages that had before been 

 unclassified to the Aryan family, new families or stocks 

 were discovered, and this process has been carried on from 

 year to year until scores or even hundreds of families are 

 recognized, and until we may reasonably conclude that 

 there was no single primitive speech common to mankind, 

 but that man had multiplied and spread throughout the 

 habitable earth anterior to the development of organized 

 languages, that is, languages have sprung from innumer- 

 able sources after the dispersion of mankind. 



The progress in language has not been by multiplication 

 which would be but a progress in degradation under the now 

 well-recognized laws of evolution ; but it has been in inte- 

 gration from a vast multiplicity toward a unity. True, all 

 evolution has not been in this direction. There has often 

 been degradation as exhibited in the multiplicity of lan- 

 guages and dialects of the same stock, but evolution in 



