y that Hebrew was the original language had gone to pieces;
but nothing had taken its place as a finality. Great authorities,
like Buddeus, were still cited in behalf of the narrower belief; but
everywhere researches, unorganized though they were, tended to destroy
it. The story of Babel continued indeed throughout the whole eighteenth
century to hinder or warp scientific investigation, and a very curious
illustration of this fact is seen in the book of Lord Nelme on The
Origin and Elements of Language. He declares that connected with the
confusion was the cleaving of America from Europe, and he regards the
most terrible chapters in the book of Job as intended for a description
of the Flood, which in all probability Job had from Noah himself. Again,
Rowland Jones tried to prove that Celtic was the primitive tongue, and
that it passed through Babel unharmed. Still another effect was made by
a Breton to prove that all languages took their rise in the language of
Brittany. All was chaos. There was much wrangling, but little earnest
controversy. Here and there theologians were calling out frantically,
beseeching the Church to save the old doctrine as "essential to the
truth of Scripture"; here and there other divines began to foreshadow
the inevitable compromise which has always been thus vainly attempted in
the history of every science. But it was soon seen by thinking men that
no concessions as yet spoken of by theologians were sufficient. In
the latter half of the century came the bloom period of the French
philosophers and encyclopedists, of the English deists, of such German
thinkers as Herder, Kant, and Lessing; and while here and there some
writer on the theological side, like Perrin, amused thinking men by
his flounderings in this great chaos, all remained without form and
void.(417)

(417) For Hottinger, see the preface to his Etymologicum Orientale,
Frankfort, 1661. For Leibnitz, Catharine the Great, Hervas, and Adelung,
see Max Muller, as above, from whom I have quoted very fully; see also
Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, etc., p. 269. Benfey declares
that the Catalogue of Hervas is even now a mine for the philologist. For
the first two citations from Leibnitz, as well as for a statement of his
importance in the history of languages, see Max Muller, as above, pp.
135, 136. For the third quotation, Leibnitz, Opera, Geneva, 1768, vi,
part ii, p. 232. For Nelme, see his Origin and Elements of Languag