ord, in the same sense,
will be applicable to language, and will justify us in removing the
science of language from the pale of the historical to that of the
physical sciences.

There is another objection which we have to consider, and the
consideration of which will again help us to understand more clearly the
real character of language. The great periods in the growth of the earth
which have been established by geological research are brought to their
close, or very nearly so, when we discover the first vestiges of human
life, and when the history of man, in the widest sense of the word,
begins. The periods in the growth of language, on the contrary, begin and
run parallel with the history of man. It has been said, therefore, that
although language may not be merely a work of art, it would, nevertheless,
be impossible to understand the life and growth of any language without an
historical knowledge of the times in which that language grew up. We ought
to know, it is said, whether a language which is to be analyzed under the
microscope of comparative grammar, has been growing up wild, among wild
tribes, without a literature, oral or written, in poetry or in prose; or
whether it has received the cultivation of poets, priests, and orators,
and retained the impress of a classical age. Again, it is only from the
annals of political history that we can learn whether one language has
come in contact with another, how long this contact has lasted, which of
the two nations stood higher in civilization, which was the conquering and
which the conquered, which of the two established the laws, the religion,
and the arts of the country, and which produced the greatest number of
national teachers, popular poets, and successful demagogues. All these
questions are of a purely historical character, and the science which has
to borrow so much from historical sources, might well be considered an
anomaly in the sphere of the physical sciences.

Now, in answer to this, it cannot be denied that among the physical
sciences none is so intimately connected with the history of man as the
science of language. But a similar connection, though in a less degree,
can be shown to exist between other branches of physical research and the
history of man. In zooelogy, for instance, it is of some importance to know
at what particular period of history, in what country, and for what
purposes certain animals were tamed and domesticated. In ethnology, a
s