Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/227

V.] the East rather than the West as the starting-point of migration.

If the question of place must thus be left unsettled, that of time is not less uncertain. The geologist makes hitherto but lame and blundering work of establishing an absolute chronology for even the latest alterations of the earth-crust; and the student of language is compelled to found his estimates upon data not less scanty and questionable. The strata of human speech laid down in past ages have suffered most sweeping and irrestorable denudation, and their rate of growth during our present period is too greatly varying to furnish us any safe standard of general application. But to set a date lower than three thousand years before Christ for the dispersion of the Indo-European family would doubtless be altogether inadmissible; and the event is most likely to have taken place far earlier. Late discoveries are showing us that the antiquity of the human race upon the earth must be much greater than has been generally supposed. Vistas of wonderful interest are opened here, down which we can only catch glimpses; but the comparative brevity of the period covered by human records must make us modest about claiming that we shall ever understand much about ultimate beginnings, the first origin of races.

As regards, however, the grade of civilization and mode of life of the Indo-European mother-tribe before its separation into branches, the study of language is in condition to give us more definite and trustworthy information. It is evidently within our power to restore, to a certain extent, the original vocabulary of the tribe, out of the later vocabularies of the different branches. These are composed of words of every age, from the most recent to the most primitive. As the principal features of grammatical structure were struck out before the dispersion, and are yet traceable by the comparative philologist amid the host of newer formations which surround them, so was it also with the developed material of speech, with the names for such objects, and acts, and processes, and products, as the community had already found occasion, and acquired power, to express: they constituted