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documentary evidence to show the process by which the Sanscrit 
and Latin tongues originally grew out of the primeval Aryan speech, 
nor is there, in fact, the slightest direct proof of the existence of 
the Aryan language, yet no one doubts either the one position or 
the other ; and the philologist as little thinks of urging that the 
absence of records written in the Aryan tongue casts any doubt on 
the question of its former existence, as the geologist wonders at 
the non-production of the skeletons of the men who spoke it. It 
must be remembered that the evidence upon which the common 
origin of the group of languages I have referred to rests, is far in- 
ferior to that in favour of “ the descent of man for in the former 
case, it consists of the fact that a few words and grammatical forms 
are the same in the different tongues, whereas in the latter, it is 
not only that some organs are common to man and his nearest 
allies, but that there is between them an almost absolute identity 
of structure. 
The science of philology, showing as it does, that languages have 
grown by slow and insensible degrees, that they can be classified 
by a natural system of relationship, just as species and genera in 
the organic world (the only scientific explanation of which is the 
theory of their relationship by descent from common ancestors) 
rather confirms than opposes the Darwinian hypothesis, showing 
that language has not been exempt from the operation of the great 
law of evolution. 
Can it be denied, however, that the aboriginal races of the 
world (as they are called), such as the native Australian, are inter- 
mediate forms between the Aryan or Semitic nations and apes 1 
Similarly, the present inhabitants of England are certainly less 
nearly connected with the anthropoids, physically, mentally, and 
morally, than were the rude savages who co-existed hero ages ago 
with the mammoth. 
The contention that language is the exclusive attribute of man. 
and that we cannot conceive that he acquired it by any natural 
process, is, at the most, but one of those inconclusive arguments 
which Professor Huxley puts in his first category, and I do not 
