is,
therefore, a much safer guide for discovering a family likeness in
scattered members of the same family. There are languages in which there
is no trace of what we are accustomed to call grammar; for instance,
ancient Chinese; there are others in which we can still watch the growth
of grammar, or, more correctly, the gradual lapse of material into merely
formal elements. In these languages new principles of classification will
have to be applied, such as are suggested by the study of natural history;
and we shall have to be satisfied with the criteria of a morphological
affinity, instead of those of a genealogical relationship.

I have thus answered, I hope, some of the objections which threatened to
deprive the science of language of that place which she claims in the
circle of the physical sciences. We shall see in our next lecture what the
history of our science has been from its beginning to the present day, and
how far it may be said to have passed through the three stages, the
empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, which mark the
childhood, the youth, and the manhood of every one of the natural
sciences.

LECTURE III. THE EMPIRICAL STAGE.

We begin to-day to trace the historical progress of the science of
language in its three stages, the _Empirical_, the _Classificatory_, and
the _Theoretical_. As a general rule each physical science begins with
analysis, proceeds to classification, and ends with theory; but, as I
pointed out in my first lecture, there are frequent exceptions to this
rule, and it is by no means uncommon to find that philosophical
speculations, which properly belong to the last or theoretical stage, were
attempted in physical sciences long before the necessary evidence had been
collected or arranged. Thus, we find that the science of language, in the
only two countries where we can watch its origin and history--in India and
Greece--rushes at once into theories about the mysterious nature of speech,
and cares as little for facts as the man who wrote an account of the camel
without ever having seen the animal or the desert. The Brahmans, in the
hymns of the Veda, raised language to the rank of a deity, as they did
with all things of which they knew not what they were. They addressed
hymns to her in which she is said to have been with the gods from the
beginning, achieving wondrous things, and never revealed to man except in
part. In the Brahmanas, language is called the c