in our knowledge of them which can
never be filled up. Not a tenth, not a hundredth part of them has been
preserved. Yet the materials at our disposal are far greater than any
individual can use. Such are a few of the general reflections which the
present state of philology calls up.

(1) Language seems to be composite, but into its first elements the
philologer has never been able to penetrate. However far he goes back,
he never arrives at the beginning; or rather, as in Geology or in
Astronomy, there is no beginning. He is too apt to suppose that by
breaking up the existing forms of language into their parts he will
arrive at a previous stage of it, but he is merely analyzing what never
existed, or is never known to have existed, except in a composite form.
He may divide nouns and verbs into roots and inflexions, but he has no
evidence which will show that the omega of tupto or the mu of tithemi,
though analogous to ego, me, either became pronouns or were generated
out of pronouns. To say that 'pronouns, like ripe fruit, dropped out of
verbs,' is a misleading figure of speech. Although all languages have
some common principles, there is no primitive form or forms of language
known to us, or to be reasonably imagined, from which they are all
descended. No inference can be drawn from language, either for or
against the unity of the human race. Nor is there any proof that words
were ever used without any relation to each other. Whatever may be the
meaning of a sentence or a word when applied to primitive language, it
is probable that the sentence is more akin to the original form than
the word, and that the later stage of language is the result rather of
analysis than of synthesis, or possibly is a combination of the two.
Nor, again, are we sure that the original process of learning to speak
was the same in different places or among different races of men. It may
have been slower with some, quicker with others. Some tribes may have
used shorter, others longer words or cries: they may have been more
or less inclined to agglutinate or to decompose them: they may have
modified them by the use of prefixes, suffixes, infixes; by the
lengthening and strengthening of vowels or by the shortening and
weakening of them, by the condensation or rarefaction of consonants.
But who gave to language these primeval laws; or why one race has
triliteral, another biliteral roots; or why in some members of a group
of languages b becomes p, o