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Th Be 
ADDRESS. XCV 
From the relations traceable between the six Romance dialects, Italian, 
Wallachian, Rheetian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, an antecedent com- 
mon ‘ mother-tongue ’ might be inferred, and consequently the existence of 
a race anterior to the modern Italians, Spanish, French, &e., with conclusions 
as to the lapse of time requisite for such divisions and migrations of the pri- 
mitive stock, and for the modifications which the mother-language had 
undergone. History and preserved writings show that such common 
mother-race and language have existed in the Roman people and the Latin 
tongue. 
But Latin, like the equally ‘dead’ language Greek, with Sanscrit, Lithu- 
anian, Zend, and the Gothic, Slavonic, and Celtic tongues, can be similarly 
shown to be modifications of one antecedent common language; whence is to 
be inferred an antecedent race of men, and a lapse of time sufficient for their 
migration over a track extending from Iceland in the north-west to India in 
the south-east, and for all the above-named modifications to have been esta- 
blished in the common mother ‘ Arian’ tongue. 
The study of the animal kingdom has its practical results of national im- 
portance in relation to sources of food and beasts of traction and burden. 
Acts of Parliament relating to Fisheries, in order to realize their aims, must 
be based on physiological and zoological data. Animal physiology, the most 
important ground of successful medicine and surgery, is closely bound up 
with the right progress of zoology, of which, indeed, with zootomy, it is a 
branch. The great instrument of zoological science, as Lord Bacon points 
out, is a Museum of Natural History. 
Every civilized state in Europe possesses such a Museum. That of Eng- 
land has been progressively developed to the extent which the restrictive 
cireumstances under which it originated have allowed. The public is now 
fully aware, by the reports that have been published by Parliament, by re- 
presentations to Government, and by articles in Reviews and other Periodi- 
cals, of the present condition of the National Museum of Natural History 
and of its most pressing requirements. 
Of them the most pressing, and the one essential to rendering the collee- 
tions worthy of this great empire, is ‘space. Our colonies include parts of 
the earth where the forms of plants and animals are the most strange. No 
empire in the world had ever so wide a range for the collection of the various 
forms of animal life as Great Britain. Never was there so much energy and 
intelligence displayed in the capture and transmission of exotic animals by the 
enterprising traveller in unknown lands and by the hardy settler in remote 
colonies, as by those who start from their native shores of Britain. Foreign 
Naturalists consequently visit England anticipating to find in her capital and 
in her National Museum the richest and most varied materials for their com- 
parisons and deductions. And they ought to be in a state pre-eminently 
conducive to the advancement of a philosophical zoology, and on a scale 
