23 
— we have in the present historical period the picture of a body of miners 
existing deep in the bowels of the earth, without the blessings of Revelation, 
and closely approaching the condition of the utter seclusion of the savage 
races of man from their parent stocks. You have in the one case, then, almost 
as large an amount of moral degradation traceable as in the other. It is 
hardly necessary, therefore, to postulate long periods of time for that degra- 
dation. Another objection made to my paper has been on the score of language. 
The gentleman who made the objection says that language degenerates with 
races. I quite admit that there is no use in attempting to boLster up an 
argument if it will not stand, and I should be the last person to make such an 
attempt. I only wish my arguments to be tried on their merits, with the sole 
object of eliciting that which is true. American languages have been referred 
to. Now, it should be borne in mind that American languages are distin- 
guished by two main features : the one is their tendency to agglutination, and 
the other their complicated grammatical construction. My friend asks, see- 
ing that Latin in process of time degenerated with the decay of people, and 
became unworthy of its ancestry, how was it that the native American lan- 
guages could be preserved by savage races, and should not be rather degraded 
languages than cultivated and refined ? I am quite willing to admit that 
there has been deterioration, and that that deterioration is found existing in 
agglutination of words ; but I think the traces of the civilization which belonged 
to the older languages have been faithfully preserved in their grammatical 
construction. You must be extremely careful to distinguish between these 
two branches — agglutination and grammatical construction. Max Muller 
himself says that agglutination indicates a low rather than a high state of 
language ; but that is nothing to the purpose. You can easily conceive the 
American languages not being agglutinated before in their earlier history, but 
still having the same complicated grammatical construction. The aggluti- 
nation exhibited in the American languages, then, shall represent your part of 
the argument ; the complicated grammatical construction represents mine ; 
and therefore, while your view may be a true one — and I do not at all deny 
it — I may be equally correct in maintaining mine — 
The Chairman. — I can give you an instance of the truth of both these 
views in our own country. When I was in Yorkshire, in the neighbourhood 
of Sheffield, I found the process of agglutination going on with great force, as 
in such a phrase as “ on t’road,” for “ on the road.” At the same time that 
this agglutination goes on, a complicated grammatical construction may be 
retained. Among those very people, old Saxon verbs with the old Saxon 
terminations are still retained ; as in the verb “ to lig,” for “ to lie “ liggin 
on a bank,” for instance, instead of “ lying on a bank.” That I think is a 
very good example of the argument. 
Rev. J. H. Titcome. — It is also contended against my paper, that because 
English and Greek, and all the Indo-European family of languages, have a ten- 
dency to become simplified rather than to get complicated by time, as compared 
with the older Sanskrit, that therefore the refining and purifying influences of 
civilization in America should have made the American languages more simple 
