303 
her mediaeval and other dogmas. Yet, however such a work 
may be applauded by the unreflecting, I cannot but think an 
uneasy thought must have crossed the mind of the writer at 
the close of his labours that his book ought rather to have 
been called, “ A History of the Conflict between the Errors of 
certain Religionists and Science/” It seems almost impossible 
that a thinker could on calm reflection avoid seeing the utter 
failure of such an attack. Imagine, conversely, an ardent 
religionist, possessed of zeal without knowledge, penning an 
elaborate assault upon science generally, supported only by a 
long account of various admitted fallacies and exploded scien- 
tific theories. 
2. Modern Investigation into Aryan and Proto- Ary an Speech. 
Sassetti, an Italian scholar who was living at Goa in the year 
1585, speaks in a letter of an ancient Indian language called 
Sanscruta, in which treatises on arts and sciences were written; 
and De Nobili, who went to India in 1606, became “ the first 
European Sanscrit scholar.” Roth, a Jesuit missionary, appears 
also to have been a good Sanscritist, and wrote an account of 
the Sanscrit alphabet about 1666, in which year he was at 
Rome. Throughout the last century the knowledge of the 
language continued to increase, at first slowly, and ultimately 
with considerable rapidity. Grammars and dictionaries begin 
to make their appearance, and Sir William Jones, Wilkins, and 
Lord Monboddo all ultimately perceived that Sanscrit, Greek, 
and Latin, were dialects of a more ancient tongue. At length, 
in 1808, Frederick Schlegel invented the name “Indo-Ger- 
manic” as a general designation of the great Aryan family, and 
laid the foundation of true scientific investigation in his work, 
The Language and Wisdom of the Indians. Then it was seen, 
once and for ever, that just as the Romance languages, them- 
selves sister dialects, can be traced back to Latin as their parent 
and origin ; so the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, and 
Wendic forms of speech, with all their subdivisions and varia- 
tions, are themselves but dialects of the common mother- 
tongue spoken by the united Aryans in the holethnic period, 
when the whole Aryan “ earth was of one language and of one 
speech.” This vast advance in linguistic and general know- 
ledge has been styled “ the discovery of a new world.” One 
immediate result of it was that the Hebrew, a comparatively 
modern Semitic dialect, and, with the Phoenician, a twin- 
daughter of the Chaldeo-Assyrian, was no longer regarded as 
the archaic speech of mankind, or tortured in the vain effort 
to make it yield Greek and Latin words. Occasionally peo 
