entering into a new phase of grammatical life; and that while the literary
language of the Mongolians has no terminations for the persons of the
verb, that characteristic feature of Turanian speech had lately broken out
in the spoken dialects of the Buriates and in the Tungusic idioms near
Njertschinsk in Siberia.

One more observation of the same character from the pen of Robert Moffat,
in his "Missionary Scenes and Labors in Southern Africa." "The purity and
harmony of language," he writes, "is kept up by their pitches, or public
meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and
their constant intercourse. With the isolated villagers of the desert it
is far otherwise; they have no such meetings; they are compelled to
traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village.
On such occasions fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden,
often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of
two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are
beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and
those still further advanced, romping and playing together, the children
of nature, through their livelong day, _become habituated to a language of
their own_. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious; and thus,
from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect of a host of mongrel words and
phrases, joined together without rule, and _in the course of one
generation the entire character of the language is changed_."

Such is the life of language in a state of nature; and in a similar
manner, we have a right to conclude, languages grew up which we only know
after the bit and bridle of literature were thrown over their necks. It
need not be a written or classical literature to give an ascendency to one
out of many dialects, and to impart to its peculiarities an undisputed
legitimacy. Speeches at pitches or public meetings, popular ballads,
national laws, religious oracles, exercise, though to a smaller extent,
the same influence. They will arrest the natural flow of language in the
countless rivulets of its dialects, and give a permanency to certain
formations of speech which, without these external influences, could have
enjoyed but an ephemeral existence. Though we cannot fully enter, at
present, on the problem of the origin of language, yet this we can clearly
see, that, whatever the origin of language was, its first tendency m