56 GBSTUKE-LANGUAGB AND WOBD-LANGUAGE. 



In Mr. Pollock's translation : — ■ 



" The language, wliicli I spoke, was quite worn out 

 Before unto the work impossible 

 The race of Nimrod had their labour turned ; 

 For no production of the intellect 

 Which is renewed at pleasure of mankind, 

 Following the sky, was durable for aye. 

 It is a natural thing that man should speak ; 

 Eut whether this or that way, nature leaves 

 To your election, as it pleases you. 

 Ere I descended on the infernal road, 

 Upon earth, EL was called the Highest Good, 

 From whom the enjoyment flows that me surrounds ; 

 And was called ELI after ; as was meet : 

 For mortal usages are like a leaf, 

 LTpon a bough, which goes, and others come." 



Since Dante's time^ how many men of genius have set the 

 whole power of their minds against the problem, and to how 

 little purpose. Steinthal's masterly summary of these specu- 

 lations in his ' Origin of Language ' is quite melancholy read- 

 ing. It may indeed be brought forward as evidence to prove 

 something that matters far more to us than the early history 

 of language, that it is of as little use to be a good reasoner 

 when there are no facts to reason upon, as it is to be a good 

 bricklayer when there are no bricks to build with. 



At the root of the problem of the origin of language lies the 

 question, why certain words were originally used to represent 

 certain ideas, or mental conditions, or whatever we may call 

 them. The word may have been used for the idea because it 

 had an evident fitness to be used rather than another word, 

 or because some association of ideas, which we cannot now 

 trace, may have led to its choice. That the selection of words 

 to express ideas was ever purely arbitrary, that is to say, such 

 that it would have been consistent with its principle to ex- 

 change any two words as we may exchange algebraic symbols, 

 or to shake np a number of words in a bag and re-distribute 

 them at random among the ideas they represented, is a suppo- 

 sition opposed to such knowledge as we have of the formation 

 of language. And not iu language only, but in the study of 



