516 Evolution and Language 
done. More than once there has been danger of the study following 
erroneous paths, Its terminology and its point of view have in some 
degree changed. But nothing can shake the truth of the statement 
that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family 
sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, 
and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabu- 
lary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language 
long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before 
Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first 
suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp’s Comparative 
Grammar began to be published nine years before the first draft of 
Darwin’s treatise on the Origin of Species was put on paper in 1842. 
It is not therefore on the history of Comparative Philology in 
general that the ideas of Darwin have had most influence. Un- 
fortunately, as Jowett has said in the introduction to his translation 
of Plato’s Republic, most men live in a corner. The specialisation 
of knowledge has many advantages, but it has also disadvantages, 
none worse perhaps than that it tends to narrow the specialist's 
horizon and to make it more difficult for one worker to follow the 
advances that are being made by workers in other departments. No 
longer is it possible as in earlier days for an intellectual prophet to 
survey from a Pisgah height all the Promised Land. And the case 
of linguistic research has been specially hard. This study has, if the 
metaphor may be allowed, a very extended frontier. On one side it 
touches the domain of literature, on other sides it is conterminous 
with history, with ethnology and anthropology, with physiology in so 
far as language is the production of the brain and tissues of a living 
being, with physics in questions of pitch and stress accent, with 
mental science in so far as the principles of similarity, contrast, and 
contiguity affect the forms and the meanings of words through 
association of ideas. The territory of linguistic study is immense, 
and it has much to supply which might be useful to the neighbours 
who border on that territory. But they have not regarded her even 
with that interest which is called benevolent because it is not 
actively maleficent. As Horne Tooke remarked a century ago, Locke 
had found a whole philosophy in language. What have the philoso- 
phers done for language since? The disciples of Kant and of Wilhelm 
von Humboldt supplied her plentifully with the sour grapes of 
metaphysics; otherwise her neighbours have left her severely alone 
save for an occasional “Ausflug,” on which it was clear they had 
sadly lost their bearings. Some articles in Psychological Journals, 
Wundt’s great work on Volkerpsychologie', and Mauthner’s brilliantly 
1 Erster Band: Die Sprache, Leipzig, 1900. New edition, 1904. This work has been 
fertile in producing both opponents and supporters, Delbriick, Grundfragen der Sprach- 
