rms, and the movements of the
heavenly bodies; he had analyzed every substance, dissected every
organism, he knew every bone and muscle, every nerve and fibre of his own
body to the ultimate elements which compose his flesh and blood; he had
meditated on the nature of his soul, on the laws of his mind, and tried to
penetrate into the last causes of all being--and yet language, without the
aid of which not even the first step in this glorious career could have
been made, remained unnoticed. Like a veil that hung too close over the
eye of the human mind, it was hardly perceived. In an age when the study
of antiquity attracted the most energetic minds, when the ashes of Pompeii
were sifted for the playthings of Roman life; when parchments were made to
disclose, by chemical means, the erased thoughts of Grecian thinkers; when
the tombs of Egypt were ransacked for their sacred contents, and the
palaces of Babylon and Nineveh forced to surrender the clay diaries of
Nebuchadnezzar; when everything, in fact, that seemed to contain a vestige
of the early life of man was anxiously searched for and carefully
preserved in our libraries and museums,--language, which in itself carries
us back far beyond the cuneiform literature of Assyria and Babylonia, and
the hieroglyphic documents of Egypt; which connects ourselves, through an
unbroken chain of speech, with the very ancestors of our race, and still
draws its life from the first utterances of the human mind,--language, the
living and speaking witness of the whole history of our race, was never
cross-examined by the student of history, was never made to disclose its
secrets until questioned and, so to say, brought back to itself within the
last fifty years, by the genius of a Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, Bunsen, and
others. If you consider that, whatever view we take of the origin and
dispersion of language, nothing new has ever been added to the substance
of language, that all its changes have been changes of form, that no new
root or radical has ever been invented by later generations, as little as
one single element has ever been added to the material world in which we
live; if you bear in mind that in one sense, and in a very just sense, we
may be said to handle the very words which issued from the mouth of the
son of God, when he gave names to "all cattle, and to the fowl of the air,
and to every beast of the field," you will see, I believe, that the
science of language has claims on yo