ON NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAI, LANGUAGE. 



among the Kamschatkadales ;* while there are other barbarian tribes, and 

 especially among those of America,! who cannot mount higher in the scale 

 of enumeration 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 nume- 

 rical calculations ; and that as soon as they have reached this number, 

 they have uniformly commenced 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 ? 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 num- 

 ber for every ascending unit ? Such an universality cannot possibly have 

 resulted except from a like universality of cause j and we have, in this 

 single instance alone, a proof equal to mathematical demonstration, that 

 the diiferent languages into which it enters, and of which it forms so pror 

 minent a feature, must assuredly have originated, not from accident, 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 

 m, as the fair conclusion of the general argument, that it must have been 

 of divine and supernatural communication ? 



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 

 the examples, few as they are, are abundant and even super-abundant to estar 

 blish the conclusion ; and the fact on which the objection is founded, instead 

 of disturbing such conclusion, only leads us to, and completely establishes 

 a second and catenating fact ; namely, that by some means or other the pri- 

 mary and original language of man, that divinely and supernaturally com- 

 municated to him in the first age of the world, has been broken up and con^ 

 founded, 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 internvingled the natural productions of the 

 diflferent 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 distant 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 record, which professed to contain a plain and 



* Sect. iii. 17. t Robertson, vol. ii. b. iv. 91. 



I Compare also with Stewart's Phil. Essajs, vol. i. p. 150. 4to. Edin. ISIO. 



