The World's Cyclopedia of Science Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882 Excerpt: ...very much remains still to be done, yet assuredly the tendency of all later investigations into languages and their relations is more and more to refer them to a common stock and single fountain-head. 102. Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of ar y tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one can tribes have exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this matter Sayce's " Principles of Comparative Philology," pp. 170-181. another, which ho meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive' physical changes ihrough which a region has passed; is in a condition to preside at those changes, to measure the forces which were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now, with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we maycarry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low Gorman, Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with slighter intrusions from other quarters: and any one with skill to analyze the language might re-create for himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with tolerable accuracy appreciate the divers elements out of which that people was composed, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what succession they fo...