them. But they do not explain why, in man and in man only, the speaker
met with a response from the hearer, and the half articulate sound
gradually developed into Sanscrit and Greek. They hardly enable us to
approach any nearer the secret of the origin of language, which, like
some of the other great secrets of nature,--the origin of birth
and death, or of animal life,--remains inviolable. That problem is
indissolubly bound up with the origin of man; and if we ever know
more of the one, we may expect to know more of the other. (Compare W.
Humboldt, 'Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues;' M.
Muller, 'Lectures on the Science of Language;' Steinthal, 'Einleitung in
die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft.')

*****

It is more than sixteen years since the preceding remarks were written,
which with a few alterations have now been reprinted. During the
interval the progress of philology has been very great. More languages
have been compared; the inner structure of language has been laid bare;
the relations of sounds have been more accurately discriminated; the
manner in which dialects affect or are affected by the literary or
principal form of a language is better understood. Many merely verbal
questions have been eliminated; the remains of the old traditional
methods have died away. The study has passed from the metaphysical into
an historical stage. Grammar is no longer confused with language, nor
the anatomy of words and sentences with their life and use. Figures of
speech, by which the vagueness of theories is often concealed, have been
stripped off; and we see language more as it truly was. The immensity
of the subject is gradually revealed to us, and the reign of law becomes
apparent. Yet the law is but partially seen; the traces of it are often
lost in the distance. For languages have a natural but not a perfect
growth; like other creations of nature into which the will of man
enters, they are full of what we term accident and irregularity. And
the difficulties of the subject become not less, but greater, as we
proceed--it is one of those studies in which we seem to know less as we
know more; partly because we are no longer satisfied with the vague and
superficial ideas of it which prevailed fifty years ago; partly also
because the remains of the languages with which we are acquainted always
were, and if they are still living, are, in a state of transition; and
thirdly, because there are lacunae