ARTIFICIAL OR ARTICULATE LANGUAGE. 273 



you, omnipotent of itself to my own mind. Let me, however, repeat the 

 limitation, •wherever any trace of this art is found to exist; for in the miserable 

 state to which some savage tribes are reduced, without property to value, 

 treasures to count over, or a multiplicity of ideas to enumerate ; where the 

 desires are few and sordid, and the frag-ments of language that remain are 

 limited to the narrow train of every-day ideas and occurrences, it is possible 

 that there may be some hordes who have lost the art entirely; as we are told 

 by Crantz is the case with the wretched natives of Greenland,* and by the 

 Abbe Chappe with some families among- the Kamtschatkadales ;f while there 

 are other barbarian tribes, and especially among those of America,^ who 

 cannot mount higher in the scale of numeration than five, ten, or a hundred : 

 and for all beyond this point to the hair of their head, as a sign that the sum 

 is innumerable. 



But, putting by these abject and degenerated specimens of our own species 

 who have lost the general knowledge of their forefathers, whence comes it to 

 pass, that blacks and whites in every other quarter, the savage and the 

 civilized, wherever a human community has been found, have never either 

 stopped short of nor exceeded a series of ten in their numerical calculations ; 

 and that as soon as they have reached this number, they have uniformly com- 

 menced a second series with the first unit in the scale, one-ten, two-ten, 

 three-ten, four-ten, till they have reached the end of the second series ; and 

 have then commenced a third, with the next unit in rotation ; and so on, as 

 far as they have had occasion to compute ? Why have not some nations 

 broken off at the number five, and others proceeded to fifteen before they have 

 commenced a second series 1 Or why have the generality of them had any 

 thing more than one single and infinitesimal series, and, consequently, a new 

 name and a new number for every ascending unit ? Such a universality 

 cannot possibly have resulted except from a like universality of cause ; and 

 we have, in this single instance alone, a proof equal to mathematical demon- 

 stration, that the different languages into which it enters, and of which it 

 forms so prominent a feature, must assuredly have originated, not from acci- 

 dent, at different times and in different places, but from direct determination 

 and design, at the same time and in the same place; that it must be the result 

 of one grand, comprehensive, and original system. We have already proved, 

 however, that such system could not be of human invention ; and what, then, 

 remains for us but to confess peremptorily, and ex necessitate rei, as the fair 

 conclusion of the general argument, that it must have been of divine and 

 supernatural communication 1 



It may be observed, I well know, and I am prepared to admit the fact, that 

 the examples of verbal concordance in languages radically distinct, and not 

 mere dialects of the same language, are, after all, but few, and do not occur, 

 perhaps, once in five hundred instances.^ But I still contend that the exam- 

 ples, few as they are, are abundant, and even superabundant, to establish the 

 conclusion ; and the fact on which the objection is founded, instead of dis- 

 turbing such conclusion, only leads us to, and completely establishes, a second 

 and catenating fact : namely, that by some means or other the primary and 

 original language of man, that divinely and supernaturally communicated to 

 him in the first age of the world, has been broken up and confounded, and 

 scattered in various fragments over every part of the globe : that the same 

 sort of disruption which has rent asunder the solid ball of the earth; that has 

 swept away whole species and kinds, and perhaps orders of animals, and 

 vegetables, and minerals, and given us new species, and kinds, and orders in 

 their stead; that has confounded continents and oceans, the surface and the 

 abyss, and intermingled the natural productions of the different hemispheres; 

 that the same sort of disruption has assaulted the world's primeval tongue, 

 has for ever overwhelmed a great part of it, wrecked the remainder on dis- 

 tant and opposite shores, and turned up new materials out of the general 

 chaos. And if it were possible for us to meet with an ancient historical 



• Sect. i. 225. t Sect. iii. 17. t Robertson, vol. u. b. iv. 91. 



5 Compare also with Stewart's Phil. Essays, vol. i. p. 150, 4to. Edin. 1810. 



