THE DESCENT OR ORIGIN OF MAN 127 



ability in every tongue, and new words are continually 

 cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the 

 memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually be- 

 come extinct. As Max Miiller"" has well remarked: "A 

 struggle for life is constantly going on among the words 

 and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the 

 shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper 

 hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent 

 virtue." To these more important causes of the survival 

 of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added; 

 for there is in the mind of man a strong love for slight 

 changes in all things. The survival or preservation of cer- 

 tain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural 

 selection. 



The perfectly regular and wonderfully complex construc- 

 tion of the languages of many barbarous nations has often 

 been advanced as a proof, either of the divine origin of these 

 languages or of the high art and former civilization of their 

 founders. Thus F. von Schlegel writes: "In those lan- 

 guages which appear to be at the lowest grade of intellec- 

 tual culture, we frequently observe a very high and elabo- 

 rate degree of art in their grammatical structure. This is 

 especially the case with the Basque and the Lapponian, and 

 many of the American languages. ' ' " But it is assuredly 

 an error to speak of any language as an art, in the sense 

 of its having been elaborately and methodically formed. 

 Philologists now admit that conjugations, declensions, etc., 

 originally existed as distinct words, since joined together; 

 and as such words express the most obvious relations be- 

 tween objects and persons, it is not surprising that they 

 should have been used by the men of most races during 

 the earliest ages. With respect to perfection, the following 

 illustration will best show how easily we may err: A Orinoid 

 sometimes consists of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell," 



e» "Nature," Jan. 6, 1870, p. 251. 



™ Quoted bj C. S. Wake, "Chapters on Man," 1868, p. 101. 



" Buokland, "Bridgewater Treatise," p. 411. 



