ublished a work at Antwerp in 1580 to prove that Dutch was the language
spoken in paradise."

In a letter to Tenzel, Leibnitz wrote, "To call Hebrew the primitive
language is like calling the branches of a tree primitive branches, or
like imagining that in some country hewn trunks could grow instead of
trees." He also asked, "If the primeval language existed even up to the
time of Moses, whence came the Egyptian language?"

But the efficiency of Leibnitz did not end with mere suggestions. He
applied the inductive method to linguistic study, made great efforts to
have vocabularies collected and grammars drawn up wherever missionaries
and travellers came in contact with new races, and thus succeeded in
giving the initial impulse to at least three notable collections--that
of Catharine the Great, of Russia; that of the Spanish Jesuit, Lorenzo
Hervas; and, at a later period, the Mithridates of Adelung. The interest
of the Empress Catharine in her collection of linguistic materials was
very strong, and her influence is seen in the fact that Washington, to
please her, requested governors and generals to send in materials from
various parts of the United States and the Territories. The work of
Hervas extended over the period from 1735 to 1809: a missionary in
America, he enlarged his catalogue of languages to six volumes, which
were published in Spanish in 1800, and contained specimens of more than
three hundred languages, with the grammars of more than forty. It should
be said to his credit that Hervas dared point out with especial care the
limits of the Semitic family of languages, and declared, as a result of
his enormous studies, that the various languages of mankind could not
have been derived from the Hebrew.

While such work was done in Catholic Spain, Protestant Germany was
honoured by the work of Adelung. It contained the Lord's Prayer in
nearly five hundred languages and dialects, and the comparison of these,
early in the nineteenth century, helped to end the sway of theological
philology.

But the period which intervened between Leibnitz and this modern
development was a period of philological chaos. It began mainly with the
doubts which Leibnitz had forced upon Europe, and ended only with the
beginning of the study of Sanskrit in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, and with the comparisons made by means of the collections of
Catharine, Hervas, and Adelung at the beginning of the nineteenth. The
old theor