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but, at the same time, it may be well to supplement it by two 
or three general considerations : — 
1. It is far more in harmony with the ordinary procedure of 
the Divinity to give man a power or faculty, and then to leave 
him to freely develop it, than to grant him at once the power to 
exercise an art in high perfection. Highly-developed language 
is and was no more an instantaneous natural endowment than are 
reading and writing. 
2. There is not the least general evidence that the Divinity 
ever bestowed a perfect or perfected language upon man, but the 
whole study and history of language tends to show the exact con- 
trary ; so that you coidd no more induce an expert to support 
such an opinion than you could persuade him to believe that the 
whole history of the Pharaohs may be compressed into four or five 
centuries. We may remember with advantage the genial irony 
of Sokrates in the Kratylos , a treatise still worthy the most 
serious attention of every linguistic student, that if we are de- 
prived of other theories, 66 we must have recourse to divine help, 
like the tragic poets, who in any perplexity have their gods 
waiting in the air.” 
3. There is nothing in our Sacred Books which negatives the 
theory of the gradual natural development of language by man. 
We read that Yahveh Elohim brought the other animals to the 
Man to see what he would call them, and whatsoever he should 
call them that was to be the name thereof. Here the variety of 
nature stimulates the power of the language-possessing animal. 
He, not Yahveh, finds names for the other animals, appellations 
such as he deems to be appropriate for them. He sculptures 
names, if the expression may be permitted. 
4. Language, like sculpture, poetry, and every other human 
production, is very imperfect ; and this imperfection becomes 
glaringly apparent when linguistic forms are placed beneath 
the microscope of scientific investigation. Without referring 
to small special illustrations, almost every thinker knows 
how inadequate even the present elaborated condition of 
language is for the expression of numerous highly delicate 
imaginations and ideas ; how translation into speech frequently 
disfigures their symmetry and obscures their drift, and how in 
some instances, as in the case of many dream-combinations, 
language is absolutely unable to reproduce them. Dr. Tylor 
forcibly remarks : — 
“ Take language all in all over the world, it is obvious that the 
processes by which words are made and adapted have far less to 
do with systematic arrangement and scientific classification, than 
with mere rough and ready ingenuity. Let any one whose voca- 
tion it is to realise philosophical and scientific conceptions, and 
