to fancy that the culture and civilization of modern Europe are superior to those of any other age or of any other part of the world; the Anglo-Indian calls the descendants of Manu and Vikramaditya “niggers," and a great English poet has declared: "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." It is hard to remember that ours is not the only civilization the world has seen; that in many things it falls short of that of Athens, or even those of ancient Egypt and Babylonia, or modern Japan; and that we are not the best judges of our own deservings.

The spirit of vanity has invaded the science of language itself. We have come to think that not only is the race to which we belong superior to all others, but that the languages we speak are equally superior. That inflection is the supreme effort of linguistic energy, that it marks the highest stage in the development of speech, is regarded as a self-evident axiom. The Greek and Latin classics have formed the staple and foundation of our education, and if we have advanced beyond them, it is generally to the study of Hebrew or Sanskrit, themselves also inflected tongues. The inflected Aryan languages, whether living or dead, have formed our canons of taste, and our judgment of what is right or wrong in the matter of language. Even the grammars of our own English speech have been forced into a classical mould, and been adorned with tenses and cases, if not genders. The belief that whatever is unfamiliar must be either wrong or absurd, exercises a wider influence than is ordinarily imagined. Everything has tended to make the European scholar see in an inflected language the normal

type of a perfect and cultivated tongue. The dialects he speaks or studies are mostly inflectional ones, and even should he be acquainted with languages like Chinese or Basque, which belong to another class of speech, the acquaintance has seldom been made in the earlier and more impressionable years of life.

But there is a further reason for the widespread opinion that an inflectional language must necessarily rank before all others. The founders and cultivators of comparative philology were Germans, who spoke therefore one of the most highly inflected languages of modern Europe. The vanity of race and education was thus supplemented by the vanity of nationality and custom. The great Grimm, it is true, recognized the superiority of grammarless English, and even urged his countrymen to adopt it, but it is needless to say that he met with no support. It was just the "poverty" and want of inflections which characterize modern English, that seemed to indicate its degenerate and imperfect nature. If great works had been produced in it, this was in spite of its character, not by reason of it. The prejudices of a classical education were still strong; the literature of a language was confounded with the language itself, and the fallacy maintained that because certain writers of Greece, or Rome, or Judea were models of style, the languages in which they wrote must be models too. Comparative philology has had a slow and laborious task in rooting up these false notions, and laying down that whatever may be its form, that language is best which best expresses the thoughts of its speakers. Language is an object of study in and for itself, not because of the books that may have been composed in it, and

it not unfrequently happens that some of the most precious of its secrets are to be discovered in jargons the very names of which are almost unknown. It is not in Greek or Latin or Sanskrit that we shall find the answers to many of the most pressing questions of linguistic science, but in the living dialects of the present world. The antiquarian study of language is no doubt indispensable to a historical science like glottology; but this antiquarian study must be preceded, corrected, and verified, by a study of the pronunciation and usages of actual speech. Comparative philology rests upon phonology, and in phonology we must begin with the known sounds of living language.

Just as the type of physical beauty differs among the various races of the earth, so, too, does the type of literary excellence. The Chinaman finds more to admire in the language and style of his classics than in those of Plato. or Shakspeare, and Montezuma would probably have preferred an Aztec poem to all the works of Æschylus or Goethe. If we are to decide between the rival claims of different forms of speech to pre-eminence, it must be upon other grounds than the excellency of the literature belonging to them; and we have already seen in a previous chapter how seriously it may be doubted whether, after all, an inflectional language stands on a higher level than an agglutinative one.

The number of known inflectional families of speech is not large, though the literary and historical importance of two of them far exceeds that of any other group of languages. Passing by Hottentot, the inflectional character of which, though maintained by Bleek and

Lepsius, is denied by Friedrich Müller, all the inflec

ional languages of which we know are confined to Western Europe and the basin of the Mediterranean. South of the Caucasus comes Georgian, the leading representative of the so-called Alarodian family, to which the dialect of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van may have belonged. It is just possible that the extinct language of the Lykian inscriptions is to be included in this family, though Savelsberg and others would connect it. with the Indo-European group, and especially with Zend. Neither roots nor grammatical forms, however, seem to permit this; and it is for the present safest to regard the ancient Lykian as, like the Etruscan, a relic of an otherwise extinct family of speech. South of Georgia, again, comes the domain of the Semitic languages which once extended from the Tigris to the Mediterranean, and from the Tauros and Zagros ranges to the Indian Ocean and Abyssinia. Probably the Old Egyptian of the monuments, which goes back to between 4000 and 5000 B.C., along with its daughter, Coptic, must be considered as remotely connected with the Semitic group, as well as the so-called Sub-Semitic dialects of northern Africa, Berber, Haussa, &c. The larger part of Europe, together with India, Persia, and Armenia, is occupied by the Aryan family which has now scattered its colonies over the whole world. In fact, modern emigration is almost wholly confined to Aryans, Jews, and Chinese.

The Aryan or Indo-European family has been baptized with a variety of names. "Indo-European" is perhaps the one in most favour, and the chief objection to it is its length. "Indo-Germanic," the term chosen by Bopp, has

now a wide circulation among German scholars, "for no
other assignable reason," says Prof. Whitney, "than that
it contains the foreign appellation of their own particular
branch, as given by their conquerors and teachers, the
Romans." 1 Sanskritic" has also been proposed, but is
now universally discarded, as giving undue prominence
to a single representative of the family. "Japhetic,"
modelled after "Semitic," is still occasionally used; it
is, however, thoroughly objectionable, as the so-called
'ethnological table" in Genesis is really geographical,
and the descendants of Japhet do not cover the different
branches of the Aryan group. "Caucasian" is another
term, which has been immortalized by Tennyson; but
the term originated rather with the physiologists than
the philologists, and is in no way applicable, since
none of the Caucasian tribes, with the single exception
of the little colony of the Iron or Ossetes, belong to
the Aryan race. Iron is but a form of Aryan, a name
which is due to Prof. Max Müller. In the Rig-Veda,
"ârya occurs frequently as a national name and as a
name of honour, comprising the worshippers of the gods
of the Brahmans, as opposed to their enemies, who are
called in the Veda Dasyus." The word is a derivative
from arya, perhaps "ploughman" or "cultivator," which
is applied in later Sanskrit to the Vaisyas or "house-
holders" of the third caste. The great recommendation
which "Aryan" possesses is its shortness, and since it has
been widely adopted it is the term which is generally
used in the present work. It must not be forgotten,

1 "Life and Growth of Language" (1875), p. 180.
2 Max Müller: "Lectures," i. (8th edition), p. 275.