94 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



home ; and among these only names of things and relationships that 

 have never changed in either country, such as Father, Mother, God, 

 Home. 



Now suppose that about the time those American colonists 

 left England, centuries ago, another colony had drifted away in an 

 opposite direction, say to New Zealand, and had been similarly cut 

 off from their former home, and had similarly also come in contact 

 with new tribes and new scenes, and during a period of say two or 

 three thousand years had their character and language subjected to 

 all such changing influences as had come over the character and 

 speech of their cousins the American colonists. At the end of that 

 period let a New Zealander meet with an American, and they 

 will be barbarians to each other, and will never suspect that they 

 have the remotest trace of common brotherhood. 



Let us suppose that for several centuries the forefathers 0£ 

 these two people have been growing fewer and fewer in England, 

 and that at last they all leave their native country and emigrate to 

 America, taking with them one book, their English bible, in their 

 own peculiar language. Of course that book cannot be read by the 

 Americans, for they now speak a different tongue. But they entrust 

 this sacred book to the custody of their priests, some of whom have 

 learned the English tongue and can understand the book. In course 

 of time the language of the book and of the English speaking portion 

 of the people becomes a dead or unspoken language, and while the 

 Americans and New Zealanders in their respectve homes keep on 

 speaking their respective tongues, the English bible lies in Ameri- 

 can monasteries unused. 



At length, after the lapse of centuries, that old bible falls into 

 the hands of a scholarly New Zealander who is travelhng in 

 America among foreigners as he thinks. He makes himself maste^ 

 of the dead language in which the book is written. He makes him. 

 self master at the same time of the language of the American people 

 in whose custody he has found it. What is his surprise and delight 

 to find that both the language of that people, and the dead language 

 of that book are constructed on the same general plan with his own, 

 and that the names of certain familiar personal relationships, and 

 certain familiar objects in nature, and in common life are almost 

 precisely identical in all three. They have all the same names for 



