ch and
Gruber, article Babylon. For a good general statement, see Bible Myths,
New York, 1883, chap. iii. For Aristotle's strange want of interest in
any classification of the varieties of human speech, see Max Muller,
Lectures on the Science of Language, London, 1864, series i, chap. iv,
pp. 123-125.

But naturally the version of the legend which most affected Christendom
was that modification of the Chaldean form developed among the Jews and
embodied in their sacred books. To a thinking man in these days it is
very instructive. The coming down of the Almighty from heaven to see
the tower and put an end to it by dispersing its builders, points to the
time when his dwelling was supposed to be just above the firmament or
solid vault above the earth: the time when he exercised his beneficent
activity in such acts as opening "the windows of heaven" to give down
rain upon the earth; in bringing out the sun every day and hanging up
the stars every night to give light to the earth; in hurling comets, to
give warning; in placing his bow in the cloud, to give hope; in, coming
down in the cool of the evening to walk and talk with the man he had
made; in making coats of skins for Adam and Eve; in enjoying the odour
of flesh which Noah burned for him; in eating with Abraham under the
oaks of Mamre; in wrestling with Jacob; and in writing with his own
finger on the stone tables for Moses.

So came the answer to the third question regarding language; and all
three answers, embodied in our sacred books and implanted in the Jewish
mind, supplied to the Christian Church the germs of a theological
development of philology. These germs developed rapidly in the warm
atmosphere of devotion and ignorance of natural law which pervaded the
early Church, and there grew a great orthodox theory of language, which
was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all," for
nearly two thousand years, and to which, until the present century, all
science has been obliged, under pains and penalties, to conform.

There did, indeed, come into human thought at an early period some
suggestions of the modern scientific view of philology. Lucretius had
proposed a theory, inadequate indeed, but still pointing toward the
truth, as follows: "Nature impelled man to try the various sounds of the
tongue, and so struck out the names of things, much in the same way as
the inability to speak is seen in its turn to drive children to the use
of gestur