what then is Language, what is Myth, and whence are they? Broadly, the term language may be applied to whatever social beings employ to communicate passion or sentiment, or to influence one another; whatever is made a vehicle of intelligence, ideographic or phonetic, is language. In this category may be placed, as we have seen, gestures, both instinctive and artificial; emotional expression, displayed in form or feature; vocal sounds, such as the cries of birds, the howling of beasts. Indeed, language is everywhere, in everything. While listening to the rippling brook, the roaring sea, the murmuring forest, as well as to the still small voice within, we are but reading from the vocabulary of nature.

Thus construed, the principle assumes a variety of shapes, and may be followed through successive stages of development. In fact, neither form nor feature can be set in motion, or even left in a state of repose, without conveying intelligence to the observer. The countenance of man, whether it will or not, perpetually speaks, and speaks in most exquisite shades of significance, and with expression far more delicate than that employed by tongue or pen. The face is the reflex of the soul; a transparency which glows with light, divine or devilish, thrown upon it from within. It is a portrait of individual intelligence, a photograph of the inner being, a measure of innate intelligence. And in all pertaining to the actions and passions of mankind, what can be more expressive than the language of the emotions? There are the soft, silent wooings of love, the frantic fury of hate, the dancing delirium of joy, the hungry cravings of desire, the settled melancholy of dead hopes. But more definitely, language is articulate human speech or symbolic expression of ideas.

How man first learned to speak, and whence the power of speech was originally derived, are questions concerning which tradition is uncommunicative. Even mythology, which attempts the solution of supernatural mysteries, the explanation of all phenomena not otherwise accounted for, has little to say as to the genesis of this most potential of all human powers.

Many theories have been advanced concerning the origin of language. Some of them are exploded; others in various stages of modification remain, no two philologists thinking exactly alike. The main hypotheses are three; the subordinate ones are legion. Obviously, speech must be either a direct, completed gift of the Creator, with one or more independent beginnings; or a human invention; or an evolution from a natural germ.

Schleicher conceives primordial language to be a simple organism of vocal gestures; Gould Brown believes language to be partly natural and partly artificial; Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart give to man the creation and development of speech by his own artificial invention. According to Herodotus, the Phrygians and the Egyptians disputed over the question of the antiquity of their languages. Psammetichus thereupon confided two babes to the care of goats, apart from every human sound. At the end of two years they were heard to pronounce the word bekos, the Phrygian for bread. The Phrygians therefore claimed for their language the seniority.

SCIENCE OF PHILOLOGY.

In ancient times it was thought that there was some one primeval tongue, a central language from which all the languages of the earth radiated. The Sythic, Ethiopic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and other languages advanced claims for this seniority. Plato believed language to be an invention of the gods, and by them given to man. Orthodox religionists did not hesitate to affirm that Hebrew, the language of Paradise, was not only given in a perfected state to man, but was miraculously preserved in a state of purity for the chosen Israel. After the dispersion from Babel, such nations as relapsed into barbarism became barbaric in speech. And in the roots of every dialect of both the old world and the new, the Fathers were able to discern Hebrew analogies sufficient to confirm them in their dogma. Indeed other belief was heresy.

There were others who held that, when gesture-language and the language of the emotions were found insufficient for the growing necessities of man, by common consent, it was agreed that certain objects should be represented by certain sounds, and that so, when a word had been invented for every object, language was made.

Another doctrine, called by Mr. Wedgwood, its enthusiastic advocate, 'onomatopœia,' and by Professor Max Müller the 'bow-wow' theory, explains the origin of language in the effort of man to imitate the cries of nature. Thus, for dog the primitive languageless man would say bow-wow; to the rivulet, the wind, the birds and beasts, names were applied which as far as possible were but reproductions of the sounds made by these elements or animals.

Thus philology up to a comparatively late period was a speculation rather than a science. Philosophers sought to know whence language came rather than what language is. But when the great discovery concerning the Arian and Semitic families was made, comparative philologists went to work after the manner of practical investigators in other branches of study, by collecting, classifying and comparing vocabularies, and therefrom striking out a path backward to original trunks. Catalogues of languages were published, one in 1800 by Hervas, a Spanish Jesuit, containing three hundred dialects, followed by Adelung and Vater's Mithridates, from 1806-17. But not until Sanscrit was made a subject of European study did it become apparent that affinities of tongues are subject to the laws that govern affinities of blood. Then it was that a similarity was discovered, not only between the Sanscrit and the Greek and Latin tongues, but between these languages and the Teutonic, Celtic, Iranic, and Indic, all of which became united in the great Arian family. At the same time, the ancient language of the Jews, the Arabic, and the Aramaic—which constitute the Semitic family—were found to be totally different from the Arian in their radical structure. From these investigations, philologists were no less convinced that the Indo-European languages were all of the same stock, than that the Semitic idioms did not belong to it. The doctrine of the Fathers therefore would not stand; for it was found that all languages were not derivations from the Hebrew, nor from any other known central tongue.

Then too, the subordination of tongues to the laws of evolution became apparent. It was discovered that language was in a state of constant change; that, with all its variations, human speech could be grouped into families, and degrees of relationship ascertained; and that, by the comparison of vocabularies, a classification at once morphological and genealogical could be made. Varieties of tongues, as numberless as the phases of humanity, could be traced back towards their beginnings and resolved into earlier forms. It was discovered that in the first order of linguistic development, words are monosyllabic. In this rudimentary stage, to which the Chinese, Tibetan, and perhaps the Japanese belong, roots, or sounds expressive only of the material or substantial parts of things, are used. In the second stage, called the polysynthetic, aggregative, or agglutinate, a modifying termination, significant of the relations of ideas or things to each other, is affixed or glued to the root. To the agglutinate languages belong the American and Turanian families. In the third, called the inflectional stage, which comprises only the Arian and Semitic families, the two elements are more perfectly developed, and it is only in this stage that language can attain the highest degree of richness and refinement.

VARIATIONS OF LANGUAGE.

While these stages or conditions are recognized by all, it is claimed