a
Latin "co-operire" was even in 1802 well-known to many. To this day,
in spite of recent elaborate attempts (Most recently in H. Moller's
"Semitisch und Indogermanisch", Erster Teil, Kopenhagen, 1907.) to
establish connection between the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic families
of languages, there is no satisfactory evidence of such relation between
these families. This is not to deny the possibility of such a connection
at a very early period; it is merely to say that through the lapse
of long ages all trustworthy record of such relationship, if it ever
existed, has been, so far as present knowledge extends, obliterated.

But while Stephen Weston was publishing, with much public approval, his
collection of amusing similarities between languages--similarities which
proved nothing--the key to the historical study of at least one family
of languages had already been found by a learned Englishman in a distant
land. In 1783 Sir William Jones had been sent out as a judge in the
supreme court of judicature in Bengal. While still a young man at Oxford
he was noted as a linguist; his reputation as a Persian scholar had
preceded him to the East. In the intervals of his professional duties
he made a careful study of the language which was held sacred by
the natives of the country in which he was living. He was mainly
instrumental in establishing a society for the investigation of language
and related subjects. He was himself the first president of the society,
and in the "third anniversary discourse" delivered on February 2, 1786,
he made the following observations: "The Sanscrit language, whatever be
its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the GREEK,
more copious than the LATIN, and more exquisitely refined than either,
yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots
of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine
them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common
source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason,
though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and
the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same
origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same
family, if this was the place for discussing any question concerning the
antiquities of Persia." ("Asiatic Researches", I. page 422, "Works