3o6 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 



The rest is incidental and a matter of detail. The 

 question so often ventilated, and now thoroughly worn 

 out, whether mankind is descended from one or more 

 pairs, is solved by the inference that the stock in which 

 language first arose, separated itself gradually from its 

 animal progenitors, and that the selection which led to 

 language and reason necessarily took place among large 

 communities of individuals. The scriptural conception 

 of the unity of the human race would be more nearly 

 approached if all linguistic families pointed to a single 

 source. But if it could be shown that certain linguistic 

 families lead to utterly discordant roots, the investiga- 

 tion of nature might furnish the inevitable corollary that 

 language originated in various parts of the world, — 

 in other words, that a separation into species took place 

 before selection had reached the point of forming lan- 

 guage. The latter case is by far the most probable, and 

 is, in fact, received as the only one possible by most of 

 the linguists occupied with this question, and is most 

 especially defended by Friedrich Miiller.*' " At the 

 time," he says, " when there ' were races and no nations, 

 man was a speechless animal, as yet, entirely destitute 

 of the mental development which rests upon the agency 

 of language. Independently of the premisses unfolded 

 by natural history, this hypothesis is forced upon us by 

 the contemplation of the languages themselves. The 

 various families of languages, which linguistic science is 

 able to discriminate, not only presuppose, by their diver- 

 sity of form and material, several independent origins, 

 but, within one and the same race, they point to several 

 mutually independent points of origin." 



In order to afford the reader some notion of the con- 



