raudulent, and endeavoured to prove that the Brahmans had made it up
from the vocabulary and grammar of Greek and Latin. Others exercised
their ingenuity in picking the new discovery to pieces, and still others
attributed it all to the machinations of Satan.

On the other hand, the more thoughtful men in the Church endeavoured to
save something from the wreck of the old system by a compromise. They
attempted to prove that Hebrew is at least a cognate tongue with the
original speech of mankind, if not the original speech itself; but
here they were confronted by the authority they dreaded most--the great
Christian scholar, Sir William Jones himself. His words were: "I can
only declare my belief that the language of Noah is irretrievably lost.
After diligent search I can not find a single word used in common by
the Arabian, Indian, and Tartar families, before the intermixture of
dialects occasioned by the Mohammedan conquests."

So, too, in Germany came full acknowledgment of the new truth, and from
a Roman Catholic, Frederick Schlegel. He accepted the discoveries in the
old language and literature of India as final: he saw the significance
of these discoveries as regards philology, and grouped the languages of
India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany under the name afterward so
universally accepted--Indo-Germanic.

It now began to be felt more and more, even among the most devoted
churchmen, that the old theological dogmas regarding the origin of
language, as held "always, everywhere, and by all," were wrong, and that
Lucretius and sturdy old Gregory of Nyssa might be right.

But this was not the only wreck. During ages the great men in the Church
had been calling upon the world to admire the amazing exploit of Adam in
naming the animals which Jehovah had brought before him, and to accept
the history of language in the light of this exploit. The early fathers,
the mediaeval doctors, the great divines of the Reformation period,
Catholic and Protestant, had united in this universal chorus. Clement
of Alexandria declared Adam's naming of the animals proof of a prophetic
gift. St. John Chrysostom insisted that it was an evidence of consummate
intelligence. Eusebius held that the phrase "That was the name thereof"
implied that each name embodied the real character and description of
the animal concerned.

This view was echoed by a multitude of divines in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Typical among these was th