XxXVI 
EVOLUTION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 
By P. Gruzs, M.A., LL.D. (Aberdeen), 
Reader in Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge. 
In no study has the historical method had a more salutary in- 
fluence than in the Science of Language. Even the earliest records 
show that the meaning of the names of persons, places, and common 
* objects was then, as it has always been since, a matter of interest to 
mankind. And in every age the common man has regarded himself 
as competent without special training to explain by inspection (if one 
may use a mathematical phrase) the meaning of any words that 
attracted his attention. Out of this amateur etymologising has 
sprung a great amount of false history, a kind of historical mythology 
invented to explain familiar names. A single example will illustrate 
the tendency. According to the local legend the ancestor of the 
Earl of Erroll—a husbandman who stayed the flight of his country- 
men in the battle of Luncarty and won the victory over the Danes 
by the help of the yoke of his oxen—exhausted with the fray 
uttered the exclamation Hoch heigh! The grateful king about 
to ennoble the victorious ploughman at once replied : 
Hoch heigh! said ye 
And Hay shall ye be. 
The Norman origin of the name Hay is well-known, and the battle of 
Luncarty long preceded the appearance of Normans in Scotland, but 
the legend nevertheless persists. 
Though the earliest European treatise on philological questions 
which is now extant—the Cratylus of Plato,—as might be expected 
from its authorship, contains some acute thinking and some shrewd 
guesses, yet the work as a whole is infantine in its handling of 
language, and it has been doubted whether Plato was more than 
half serious in some of the suggestions which he puts forward’. In 
1 For an account of the Cratylus with references to other literature see Sandys’ History 
of Classical Scholarship, 1. p. 92 ff., Cambridge, 1903. 
