IMPORTANCE AND NATURE OF THE OCEANIC LANGUAGES. 53 
working of the human mind in its early condition. In the eloquent 
words of Farrar*—“It is these (uncultivated) languages more 
than any others which are likely to throw a faint glimmer of light 
over what may be called ‘that Hocene period of the human mind 
which precedes the dawn of all history ’—for which, therefore, 
indispensable as it is for our ethnic and zoological, nay, even for 
our political and humanitarian speculations, all other lights are 
wanting. In fact, the more bizarre the method of the language, 
the more impoverished are its resources, the more miserable the 
contrivances it adopts, the more nakedly it displays the crude 
infantile expedients of a primitive speech, the more forcible the 
contrast it presents to all the languages with which we are familar, 
the more entirely is rt worthy of our philological examination. For 
after all it is, and must necessarily be, an instrument, and an 
adequate instrument, for the expression of human needs, even if 
those needs are at their lowest ; and a dim reflex of human intel- 
ligence, even if that intelligence be of the meanest and least 
developed type.” 
I1.—The stage of developmentin which the Oceanic tongues are found. 
A question of some interest in the discussion of the Oceanic 
languages relates to the stage of development in which they are 
now found. In most works on general philology, they are placed 
among languages of the agglutinating type. Butif we accept the 
common definition of agglutination, as the placing of unaltered 
roots side by side, the term will only partially apply. Many words 
are no doubt formed in this way, but the method is not the most 
prevalent one in the island languages, and therefore cannot be 
regarded as determining the type. It would be better to adopt 
the classification of Steinthal and describe them as uncultivated 
languages of the inflectional type, expressing the modifications of 
meaning by prefixed particles and suffixes.* In the Australian 
tongues these are plainly apparent, but the practice of writing 
the modifying particles apart from the root in many of the other 
languages tends to obscure the fact of inflection, and makes the 
* Farrar—Language and Languages, p. 391. 
