ges, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a
lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will
no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first
beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it
and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The
difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on
the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and
Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a
very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and
especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest
condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again
mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the
salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first
separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from
this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who
were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is
remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human
mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has
occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with
the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have
been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the makers of
these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.

But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has
traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known
language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions,
can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the
race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in
Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the
oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing
materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which
every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in
the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a
transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar.
Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots,
to which Indian grammarians such as _Panini