528 Evolution and Language 
acted in the case is stopped, and this particular form enters on the 
same course of development as other forms to which it does not 
belong?.” 
Schleicher was wrong in defining a language to be an organism 
in the sense in which a living being is an organism. Regarded 
physiologically, language is a function or potentiality of certain 
human organs; regarded from the point of view of the com- 
munity it is of the nature of an institution» More than most 
influences it conduces to the binding together of the elements that 
form a state. That geographical or other causes may effectively 
counteract the influence of identity of language is obvious. One 
need only read the history of ancient Greece, or observe the existing 
political separation of Germany and Austria, of Great Britain and the 
United States of America. But however analogous to an organism, 
language is not an organism. In a less degree Schleicher, by defining 
languages as such, committed the same mistake which Bluntschli 
made regarding the State, and which led him to declare that the 
State is by nature masculine and the Church feminine®. The views 
of Schleicher were to some extent injurious to the proper methods 
of linguistic study. But this misfortune was much more than fully 
compensated by the inspiration which his ideas, corrected and modified 
by his disciples, had upon the science. In spite of the difference 
which the psychological element represented by analogy makes be- 
tween the science of language and the natural sciences, we are 
entitled to say of it as Schleicher said of Darwin’s theory of the 
origin of species, “it depends upon observation, and is essentially an 
attempt at a history of development.” 
Other questions there are in connection with language and evolu- 
tion which require investigation—the survival of one amongst several 
competing words (e.g. why German keeps only as a high poetic word 
ross, which is identical in origin with the English work-a-day horse, 
and replaces it by pferd, whose congener the English pa(frey is 
almost confined to poetry and romance), the persistence of evolution 
till it becomes revolution in languages like English or Persian which 
have practically ceased to be inflectional languages, and many other 
problems. Into these Darwin did not enter, and they require a fuller 
investigation than is possible within the limits of the present paper. 
1 P, Giles, Short Manual of Comparative Philology, 2nd edit., p. 57, London, 1901. 
? This view of language is worked out at some length by Prof. W. D. Whitney in an 
article in the Contemporary Review for 1875, p. 718 ff. This article forms part of a con- 
troversy with Max Miiller, which is partly concerned with Darwin’s views on language. 
He criticises Schleicher’s views severely in his Oriental and Linguistic Studies, p. 298 ft., 
New York, 1873. In this volume will be found criticisms of various other views mentioned 
in this essay, 
3 Bluntschli, Theory of the State, p. 24, Second English Edition, Oxford, 1892. 
