hrough and exhausted for
the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan
languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more
with them--for languages do become exhausted: we cannot write
English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy
Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because
the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer
take the splendid dyes;--and when that final flowering of
Sanskrit is exhausted too--will the new Sixth Race language, as a
type, be a derivation from the Aryan? Then how?--Or will it,
possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of
Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through
which, during all these millions of years, such great and main
brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have
been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having
lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments
and uses?

All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the
mark. Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no
truth in them at all. And yet I think that if they were true,
they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China.

We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof:
that is, beyond the middle point. And yet one in every four of
the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I
suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or
Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the
world is Atlantean still.

Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic,
or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There
is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head,
the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and
what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles
gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from
nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his
meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but
by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says
he, 'I'm _pater,_ and the subject; set me where you will, and I
am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or,
'Now,' says he, 'I'm _patrem,_ and the object; go look for my
lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next
door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' _Patrem