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VI.] out those methods and processes which, with such modifications as the varying circumstances rendered necessary, should be applied in the investigation of other types of language also. The foundation was broad enough to build up a shapely and many-sided edifice upon. Yet the study of Indo-European language is not the science of language. Such is the diversity in unity of human speech that exclusive attention to any one of its types could only give us partial and false views of its nature and history. Endlessly as the dialects of our family appear to differ from one another, they have a distinct common character, which is brought to our apprehension only when we compare them with those of other stock; they are far from exhausting the variety of expression which the human mind is capable of devising for its thought; the linguist who trains himself in them alone will be liable to narrowness of vision, and will stumble when he comes to walk in other fields. We claim only that their inner character and outer circumstances combine to give them the first place in the regard of the linguistic scholar; that their investigation will constitute in the future, as it has done in the past, a chief object of his study; and that their complete elucidation is both the most attainable and the most desirable and rewarding object proposed to itself by linguistic science.

The general method of linguistic research has already been variously set forth and illustrated, in an incidental way; but a summary recapitulation of its principles, with fuller reference to the grounds on which they are founded, will not be amiss at this point in our progress. The end sought by the scientific investigator of language, it will be remembered, is not a mere apprehension and exposition, however full and systematic, of the phenomena of a language, or of all human speech—of its words, its forms, its rules, its usages: that is work for grammarians and lexicographers. He strives to discover the why of everything: why these words, these affixes, have such and such meanings; why usage is thus, and not otherwise; why so many and such words and forms, and they only, are found in a given tongue—and so on, in ever farther-reaching inquiry, back even to the question,