he Slavonic and possibly the
Teutonic languages also, knew the same word for fire, though they
replaced it in time by other words. Words, like all other things, will
die, and why they should live on in one soil and wither away and
perish in another, is not always easy to say. What has become of
_ignis_, for instance, in all the Romance languages? It has withered
away and perished, probably because, after losing its final
unaccentuated syllable, it became awkward to pronounce; and another
word, _focus_, which in Latin meant fireplace, hearth, altar, has
taken its place.

Suppose we wanted to know whether the ancient Aryans before their
separation knew the mouse: we should only have to consult the principal
Aryan dictionaries, and we should find in Sanskrit _mush_, in Greek
[Greek: mus], in Latin _mus_, in Old Slavonic myse, in Old High German
_mus_, enabling us to say that, at a time so distant from us that we
feel inclined to measure it by Indian rather than by our own chronology,
the mouse was known, that is, was named, was conceived and recognized as
a species of its own, not to be confounded with any other vermin.

And if we were to ask whether the enemy of the mouse, the _cat_, was
known at the same distant time, we should feel justified in saying
decidedly, No. The cat is called in Sanskrit mar_g_ara and vi_d_ala.
In Greek and Latin the words usually given as names of the cat,
[Greek: _galee_] and [Greek: _ailouros_], _mustella_ and _feles_,
did not originally signify the tame cat, but the weasel or marten. The
name for the real cat in Greek was [Greek: _katta_], in Latin
_catus_, and these words have supplied the names for cat in all the
Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic languages. The animal itself, so far as
we know at present, came to Europe from Egypt, where it had been
worshipped for centuries and tamed; and as this arrival probably dates
from the fourth century A.D., we can well understand that no common
name for it could have existed when the Aryan nations separated.[15]

In this way a more or lees complete picture of the state of
civilization, previous to the Aryan Separation, can be and has been
reconstructed, like a mosaic put together with the fragments of
ancient stones; and I doubt whether, in tracing the history of the
human mind, we shall ever reach to a lower stratum than that which is
revealed to us by the converging rays of the different Aryan
languages.

Nor is that all; for even that Proto-Ar