, and could be traced to, the
Hebrew. Every fact inconsistent with that idea was discarded. According
to the ghosts, the trouble at the tower of Babel accounted for the fact
that all people did not speak Hebrew. The Babel business settled all
questions in the science of language.

After a time, so many facts were found to be inconsistent with the
Hebrew idea that it began to fall into disrepute, and other languages
began to compete for the honor of being the original.

Andre Kempe, in 1569, published a work on the language of Paradise,
in which he maintained that God spoke to Adam in Swedish; that Adam
answered in Danish; and that the serpent--which appears to me quite
probable--spoke to Eve in French. Erro, in a work published at Madrid,
took the ground that Basque was the language spoken in the Garden of
Eden; but in 1580 Goropius published his celebrated work at Antwerp, in
which he put the whole matter at rest by showing, beyond all doubt, that
the language spoken in Paradise was neither more nor less than plain
Holland Dutch.

The real founder of the science of language was Liebnitz, a cotemporary
of Sir Isaac Newton. He discarded the idea that all languages could
be traced to one language. He maintained that language was a natural
growth. Experience teaches us that this must be so. Words are
continually dying and continually being born. Words are naturally and
necessarily produced. Words are the garments of thought, the robes of
ideas. Some are as rude as the skins of wild beasts, and others glisten
and glitter like silk and gold. They have been born of hatred and
revenge; of love and self-sacrifice; of hope and fear, of agony and joy.
These words are born of the terror and beauty of nature. The stars
have fashioned them. In them mingle the darkness and the dawn. From
everything they have taken something. Words are the crystalizations
of human history, of all that man has enjoyed and and suffered--his
victories and defeats--all that he has lost and won. Words are the
shadows of all that has been--the mirrors of all that is.

The ghosts also enlightened our fathers in astronomy and geology.
According to them the earth was made out of nothing, and a little more
nothing having been taken than was used in the construction of this
world, the stars were made out of what was left over. Cosmos, in the
sixth century, taught that the stars were impelled by angels, who either
carried them on their shoulders, rolled them