514 Evolution and Language 
some authorities, to be written in excellent Hebrew. The study 
of them has been the fascination and the despair of many a philo- 
logist. Thanks to the devoted labours of numerous scholars, mainly 
in the last sixty years, the general drift of these inscriptions 
is now known. They are the only important records of the ancient 
Umbrian language, which was related closely to that of the Samnites 
and, though not so closely, to that of the Romans on the other side 
of the Apennines. Yet less than twenty years ago a book was 
published in Germany, which boasts itself the home of Comparative 
Philology, wherein the German origin of the Umbrian language was 
no less solemnly demonstrated than had been its Celtic origin by 
Sir William Betham in 1842. 
It is good that the study of language should be historical, but the 
first requisite is that the history should be sound. How little had 
been learnt of the true history of language a century ago may be seen 
from a little book by Stephen Weston first published in 1802 and 
several times reprinted, where accidental assonance is considered 
sufficient to establish connection. Is there not a word bad in English 
and a word bad in Persian which mean the same thing? Clearly 
therefore Persian and English must be connected. The conclusion is 
true, but it is drawn from erroneous premises. As stated, this identity 
has no more value than the similar assonance between the English 
cover and the Hebrew kophar, where the history of cover as coming 
through French from a Latin co-operire was even in 1802 well-known 
to many. To this day, in spite of recent elaborate attempts! to 
establish connection between the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic 
families of languages, there is no satisfactory evidence of such re- 
lation between these families. This is not to deny the possibility of 
such a connection at a very early period; it is merely to say that 
through the lapse of long ages all trustworthy record of such relation- 
ship, if it ever existed, has been, so far as present knowledge extends, 
obliterated. 
But while Stephen Weston was publishing, with much public 
approval, his collection of amusing similarities between languages— 
similarities which proved nothing—the key to the historical study 
of at least one family of languages had already been found by a 
learned Englishman in a distant land. In 1783 Sir William Jones 
had been sent out as a judge in the supreme court of judicature 
in Bengal. While still a young man at Oxford he was noted as a 
linguist; his reputation as a Persian scholar had preceded him to 
the East. In the intervals of his professional duties he made a 
careful study of the language which was held sacred by the natives 
1 Most recently in H. Méller’s Semitisch und Indogermanisch, Erster Teil, Kopenhagen, 
1907. 
