Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/42

14 Like a tree, unobserved through the solitudes of a thousand years, up grows the mighty stem, and the mighty branches of a magnificent speech. No man saw the seed planted—no eye noticed the infant sprouts—no mortal hand watered the nursling of the grove—no register was kept of the gradual widening of its girth, or of the growing circumference of its shade—till, the deciduous dialects of surrounding barbarians dying out, the unexpected bole stands forth in all its magnitude, carrying aloft in its foliage the poetry, the history, and the philosophy of a heroic people, and dropping for ever over the whole civilized world the fruits of Grecian literature and art.

§ 20. It is always very late in the day before the seminal principles of speech are detected and explained. Indeed, the language which owed to them both birth and growth may have ceased to be a living tongue before these, the regulating elements of its formation, come to light, and are embodied in written grammars. That most elementary species of instruction which we familiarly term the A, B, C, had no express or articulate existence in the minds, or on the lips, of men, until thousands of years after the invention and employment of language; yet these, the vital constituents of all speech, were there from the beginning.