The records which have been less
intentionally preserved, not only the buildings themselves, but their
decorations, the personal ornaments of men, idols, coins, every
imaginable fragment, chance escaped from the maw of time, has its own
story for our reading. In Egypt we have found deep-hidden, secret tombs,
and, intruding on their many centuries of silence, have reaped rich
harvests of knowledge from the garnered wealth. In Babylonia the rank
vegetation had covered whole cities underneath green hillocks, and
preserved them till our modern curiosity delved them out. To-day, he who
wills, may walk amid the halls of Sennacherib, may tread the streets
whence Abraham fled, ay, he may gaze upon the handiwork of men who lived
perhaps as far before Abraham as we ourselves do after him.

Nor are our means of penetrating the past even thus exhausted. A third
chain yet more subtle and more marvellous has been found to link us to
an ancestry immeasurably remote. This unbroken chain consists of the
words from our own mouths. We speak as our fathers spoke; and they did
but follow the generations before. Occasional pronunciations have
altered, new words have been added, and old ones forgotten; but some
basal sounds of names, some root-thoughts of the heart, have proved as
immutable as the superficial elegancies are changeful. "Father" and
"mother" mean what they have meant for uncounted ages.

Comparative philology, the science which compares one language with
another to note the points of similarity between them, has discovered
that many of these root-sounds are alike in almost all the varied
tongues of Europe. The resemblance is too common to be the result of
coincidence, too deep-seated to be accounted for by mere communication
between the nations. We have gotten far beyond the possibility of such
explanations; and science says now with positive confidence that there
must have been a time when all these nations were but one, that their
languages are all but variations of the tongue their distant ancestors
once held in common.

Study has progressed beyond this point, can tell us far more intricate
and fainter facts. It argues that one by one the various tribes left
their common home and became completely separated; and that each
root-sound still used by all the nations represents an idea, an object,
they already possessed before their dispersal. Thus we can vaguely
reconstruct that ancient, aboriginal civilization. We can even g