Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/156

144 lued friend the Reverend A. Henderson of Belize. It will no doubt be found to present many variances, as might be expected from the known history of the people in later times, when we find them represented as having a language spoken by the men entirely different from that spoken by the women. This was clearly occasioned by their being a different people, a body of men driven away perhaps by a stronger faction or tribe from their own homes, who had fallen upon a weaker people killing and devouring the males, and using the females as slaves. The progeny of this combination must sooner or later as in all similar cases have grown up with a mixed language, and the frequency of this occurrence should be a warning to us not to attach too great an importance to the comparison of vocabularies merely as an identification of languages. It might happen in future ages, that when Macaulay's New Zealander comes to moralize over the ruins of London, he would compare some compendious Vocabularies of the English and French languages together, and finding some hundreds of words in them identical, jump at once to the conclusion, as some modern writers would do, that the languages were identical, and that England was only a province of France. This is only what we find certain selfimagined Ethnologists are doing, and therefore it is essentially necessary for us to be on our guard against a judgment so fallacious. Languages as I have already observed may arise from a variety of origins, and new languages may be invented as we learn from the Missionaries that children of certain savage tribes being left by their elders alone, while out on their hunting or predatory excursions, sometimes grow up with a language unintelligible to their parents. Language is so much an inherent characteristic of man that we may feel convinced of this fact as a natural contingency. If a number of children were gathered together, as in ancient times by the Egyptian monarch, and allowed to grow up together under circumstances, as under the charge of dumb keepers, so that they should hear no word whatever spoken, we may fully expect they would invent a language for themselves, perhaps as expressive as any existing. But where two languages are mixed together, we may expect to find them in their union both fuller and more forcible. The Carib language is thus said to have been remarkable for its fulness and force, although it is at the present day and always has been deficient in expressions suited to the exigencies of civilized life. From the earliest period that we hear of them, we find them carrying on their cannibal practices on the most systematic method. Amerigo