gious progress of the human race.
In the same manner, if we study living languages, it is not for their own
sake that we acquire grammars and vocabularies. We do so on account of
their practical usefulness. We use them as letters of introduction to the
best society or to the best literature of the leading nations of Europe.
In comparative philology the case is totally different. In the science of
language, languages are not treated as a means; language itself becomes
the sole object of scientific inquiry. Dialects which have never produced
any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the
Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese are as
important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important,
than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know
languages, we want to know language; what language is, how it can form a
vehicle or an organ of thought; we want to know its origin, its nature,
its laws; and it is only in order to arrive at that knowledge that we
collect, arrange, and classify all the facts of language that are within
our reach.

And here I must protest, at the very outset of these lectures, against the
supposition that the student of language must necessarily be a great
linguist. I shall have to speak to you in the course of these lectures of
hundreds of languages, some of which, perhaps, you may never have heard
mentioned even by name. Do not suppose that I know these languages as you
know Greek or Latin, French or German. In that sense I know indeed very
few languages, and I never aspired to the fame of a Mithridates or a
Mezzofanti. It is impossible for a student of language to acquire a
practical knowledge of all tongues with which he has to deal. He does not
wish to speak the Kachikal language, of which a professorship was lately
founded in the University of Guatemala,(12) or to acquire the elegancies
of the idiom of the Tcheremissians; nor is it his ambition to explore the
literature of the Samoyedes, or the New-Zealanders. It is the grammar and
the dictionary which form the subject of his inquiries. These he consults
and subjects to a careful analysis, but he does not encumber his memory
with paradigms of nouns and verbs, or with long lists of words which have
never been used in any work of literature. It is true, no doubt, that no
language will unveil the whole of its wonderful structure except to the
scholar who has studied it th