329 
The foregoing list, which includes the most celebrated dead 
languages, is, of course, not intended to be exhaustive, but 
merely indicative ; and in addition to the above-mentioned 
three great divisions, some comparative philologists of the 
highest merit add a fourth, namely : — 
IV. Poly synthetic . — The class where the sentence is fused into 
a word, and the words thus fused are reduced to their 
simplest elements.* E.g., the Eskimo sialugsiokhpok, 
44 he-is-outside-in-the-rain.” It includes : — 
1. Mexican . 
2. Peruvian. 
3. Many other dialects of North and South America , 
4. Eskimo. 
5. Basque. 
As regards the polysynthetic languages, Prof. Muller has 
remarked that, — 
64 As long as in these sesquipedalian compounds the signi- 
ficative root remains distinct, they belong to the agglutinative 
stage ; as soon as it is absorbed by the terminations, they belong 
to the inflectional stage.” t Others see in polysynthesism a sur- 
vival of the universal early state of language. The majority of 
the Old World dialects are agglutinative, and the inflectional 
branch, although exceptionally prominent, is by no means essen- 
tially superior. Thus, one of the strongest points about English, 
is the immense extent to which it has abandoned inflection, and 
the great advantages which it has gained thereby. 
44 That language,” observes Prof. Sayce, 44 has most chance of 
superseding [old dialects] which, like our own, has discarded the 
cumbrous machinery of inflectional grammar. The great Grimm 
once advised his countrymen to give up their own language in 
favour of English, and a time may yet come when they will 
follow the advice of the founder of scientific German philology.” J 
It may be incidentally remarked, that if the principle of Fixity 
of Type obtains in languages, and, according to many of the 
highest authorities, it undoubtedly does ; so that, e.g. an in- 
flectional language will have always been inflectional, and has 
never passed through prior stages of isolation and agglutination 
or either of them, then we may find in this permanence of 
character a powerful argument against the doctrine of Evolution. 
9. The Transition from Drawing to Writing. 
The earliest inscribed language, whether Chinese, Akkadian, 
* Vide Prof. Sayce, Introd. Sci. Lang., ii. 216. 
t Lects. Sci. Lang., i. 371. J Introd. Sci. Lang., ii. 350. 
