THE PRESIDENT’S, ADDRESS. ; 171 
would come through the breadths of the world, whither their loving 
search for men would lead them to dying languages, no less than 
living and dead ones. Our fathers (who lived with old Dolly 
Pentreath and her ancestors among them) know by the decadence 
and dissolution of the Old Cornish, what a “dying language” 
means, It is really important to obtain accurate information about 
the language (and in the language, of course, are involved the life— 
both secular and religious) of decaying tribes of mankind. No 
one can tell what knowledge, which might hereafter turn out to be 
of incalculable worth, may be year after year permitted to die out 
for want of collection and record. ‘ At Rome,” said Max-Miiller to 
the International Orientalists last week, ‘‘in the time of the Scipios, 
hundreds of people might have written down a grammar and 
dictionary of the Etruscan, Oscan, and Umbrian tongues” (then 
decadent in out-of-the-way places up and down the Apennines, as 
our Old Cornish was the other day). ‘But there were men then, 
as there are now, who shrugged their shoulders, and asked : ‘ What 
can be the use of preserving these uncouth and barbarous idioms?’ 
What,” reasonably adds the Professor, “what would we not give 
now for some such records?” Cornish, thanks to Dr. Bannister 
and other loving philologists, has its record, and its remains’ will 
enter the fibre of Celtic philology; but we are lost in conjecture, 
when we try to understand the old predecessors of Latin in the 
Italian peninsula. With knowledge of a race’s language, thought, 
and sentiment, deeper sympathy and a surer way to the heart 
would arise ; and so practical a philanthropy would lead, if not to 
the reception of Christianity, at any rate to the lessening of pre- 
judice ; and nothing but better feeling could arise out of the better 
understanding. And thus comparing languages together, and 
examining literatures, and discovering that man is our fel/ow 
everywhere, in all the capacities of his intellect and aspirations of 
his heart, a sharer in our common hopes and fears, sympathies and 
antipathies, nations (we may hope) may learn to esteem and respect 
each other with a true and kindly humanity. 
§ II. I pass to other topics. Most of us watch with interest 
the voyage of H.M.S. Challenger on her scientific expedition. Not 
only are we informed by her soundings of the contours of the 
Ocean Depths, but we are told of the strange things in Fauna and 
Flora which her dredges bring to light. Last year I quoted Dr. 
Wyville Thomson as opening up in the discoveries links of life 
