hat profound study, patient thought, and severity of method
have asserted in this, as in other departments of knowledge, their
superiority to point-blank guessing and the bewitching generalization
conjured out of a couple or so of assumed facts, which, even if they
turn out to be singly true, are no more nearly related than Hecate and
green cheese.

We do not object to that milder form of philology of which the works
of Dean Trench offer the readiest and most pleasing example, and which
confines itself to the mere study of words, to the changes of form and
meaning they have undergone and the forgotten moral that lurks in them.
But the interest of Dr. Trench and others like him sticks fast in words,
it is almost wholly an aesthetic interest, and does not pretend to
concern itself with the deeper problems of language, its origin, its
comparative anatomy, its bearing upon the prehistoric condition of
mankind and the relations of races, and its claim to a place among the
natural sciences as an essential element in any attempt to reconstruct
the broken and scattered annals of our planet. It would not be just to
find fault with Dr. Trench's books for lacking a scientific treatment
to which they make no pretension, but they may fairly be charged with
smelling a little too much of the shop. There is a faint odor of the
sermon-case about every page, and we learn to dread, sometimes to skip,
the inevitable homily, as we do the moral at the end of an AEsopic fable.
We enter our protest, not against Dr. Trench in particular, for his
books have other and higher claims to our regard, but because we find
that his example is catching, the more so as verbal morality is much
cheaper than linguistic science. If there be anything which the study of
words should teach, it is their value.

There are two theories as to the origin of language, which, for
shortness, may be defined as the poetic and the matter-of-fact. The
former (of which M. Ernest Renan is one of the most eloquent advocates)
supposes a primitive race or races endowed with faculties of cognition
and expression so perfect and so intimately responsive one to the
other, that the name of a thing came into being coincidently with the
perception of it. Verbal inflections and other grammatical forms came
into use gradually to meet the necessities of social commerce between
man and man, and were at some later epoch reduced to logical system by
constructive minds. If we understand him