460 
from the history of many languages with which we have a small acquaint- 
ance, but I will argue it from languages of a historical character. So far as 
historical languages are concerned, there cannot be a doubt that their deve- 
lopment is exceedingly slow. Take the case of the Greek language. The 
Homeric poems date unquestionably from a thousand years before Christ, 
and possibly they are still older. Now these Homeric poems present the 
Greek language in an exceedingly perfect form, not so perfect as in the days 
of Pericles, but still very perfect ; and the Greek race must have been then 
a very intellectual race. We can trace the history of the development of the 
language from then until now ; it forms one continuous history. I find that 
from my knowledge of ancient Greek I can generally make out a great deal 
of the contents of a modern Greek newspaper, though, of course, I cannot 
read it perfectly ; but it seems that the modern Greek or Romaic more 
generally resembles the ancient Greek than any other of the modem lan- 
guages of Europe resemble their prototypes. In the 2,800 years which 
have passed since the Homeric poems were composed we can trace the Greek 
language in all its stages, and see very distinctly the rate of progress at which 
it has developed from the days of Homer until it reached its highest perfec- 
tion ; and then its retrogression from its highest perfection throughout the 
Middle Ages and down to the present time. It is evident that the develop- 
ment of languages is a matter of very slow growth ; but that is not the whole 
of our evidence. Let us note the development of the modern European lan- 
guages out of the Latin. They have had very slow progress, although there 
have been more disturbing influences at work upon them than were brought 
to bear upon the Greek language in the interval between modem Romaic 
and ancient Greek. French, Spanish, and Italian are fundamentally Latin. 
Their whole ground-work is Latin, although they suffered changes and alter- 
ations from the irruption of the Northern barbarians in the Roman Empire, 
and from the contact with Eastern races in Spain, modifying those languages 
to a much greater extent than has been the case with the Greek tongue, 
which has been developed naturally ; yet the development we trace is very 
slow and gradual. We must now ascend one step higher. The Greek and 
Latin languages and the languages of modern Europe are all related, and flow 
out of a language which was pre-historic to the present Sanskrit, which is a 
cognate language to the Greek, and they were each respectively developed 
from a language pre-existing to either of them. When these languages entered 
Europe they must have come by a migration from some portion of Asia, 
where that prior language was then spoken, and it becomes a very interesting 
question as to the relationship which Greek bears to the Latin. The earliest 
Latin, although undoubtedly a cognate language with Greek, and flowing 
from a race which must have migrated into Europe, is yet more widely 
different from Greek in character than the various modem languages of 
Europe are from their original, and I think we may fairly argue that it would 
have taken a considerable period of time to develope the Latin and Greek in 
the various complicated forms which they possess in historical times. But 
to the whole of those long periods of development of these languages we 
