ittle. This is so far true that even the wisest books
on Language affect one, after all, like a series of brilliant puns. More
important merits than this must, no doubt, be attributed to Max Mueller;
but, after all, so wayward is he and so whimsical, such a lover of
paradox and of digression, that he must perpetually exasperate that
sedate race of men whom Philology is supposed to have peculiarly chosen
for its own. In this second series of Lectures, especially, "we have
been at a great feast of languages, and have stolen the scraps."

Beginning the volume mildly with a demure introduction, we suddenly are
over head and ears in "dialectic regeneration," which seems like
theology, only that it introduces us to a mild baby-talk in that
wonderful language, the Annamitic, where the sentence "ba ba ba ba"
means, "Three ladies gave a box on the ear to the favorite of the
prince." Then comes Bishop Wilkins's "universal language," then a
discussion of Locke, then the theory of harmonics, and then many pages
of anatomical plates. Then phonetic changes; followed by a chapter on
"Grimm's Law," which would give work enough for a lifetime. We next
plunge into botany, and have a whole chapter on the "words for fir, oak,
and beech," which shows that the author, like our own Mr. Marsh, has
studied the literal roots as well as the symbolic. Later, we come to
astronomy, whence one of our author's favorite theories conducts us into
the Greek mythology, to which two whole lectures are given. Then comes
another chapter, tracing the "myths of the dawn" still farther back
toward the dim origin of the Aryan race; and the book closes with a
chapter on Modern Mythology, of which some twenty pages are given to an
exhaustive treatise, anatomical and historical, on the Barnacle Goose.
This brings us round handsomely to Locke and Sir William Hamilton once
more, and there leaves us.

What change has come over the accomplished and eloquent man who was
wisely transplanted to England to teach us Anglo-Saxons what scholarship
meant, and who made his first series of Lectures a model of clever and
effective statement? He congratulates himself, in the introduction to
this volume, on having left out all that was merely elementary. This is
true in respect to philology, perhaps, but he has certainly contrived to
introduce the elements of a great many other sciences. No matter; he
stated in the first volume all the principal points with which his
reputation is