Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/30

8 deeds and fates of mankind during the ages which precede direct historical record. It enables us to determine, in the main, both the fact and the degree of relationship subsisting among the different divisions of mankind, and thus to group them together into families, the members of which must have once set forth from a common home, with a common character and a common culture, however widely separated, and however unlike in manners and institutions, we may find them to be, when they first come forth into the light of written history. Upon the study of language is mainly founded the science of ethnology, the science which investigates the genealogy of nations. I say, mainly founded, without wishing to depreciate the claims of physical science in this regard: the relation between linguistic and physical science, and their joint and respective value to ethnology, will be made the subject of discussion at a point further on in our inquiries. But language is also pregnant with information respecting races which lies quite beyond the reach of physical science: it bears within itself plain evidences of mental and moral character and capacity, of degree of culture attained, of the history of knowledge, philosophy, and religious opinion, of intercourse among peoples, and even of the physical circumstances by which those who speak it have been surrounded. It is, in brief, a volume of the most varied historical information to those who know how to read it and to derive the lessons it teaches.

To survey the whole vast field of linguistic science, taking even a rapid view of all the facts it embraces and the results derived from their examination, is obviously beyond our power in a brief series of lectures like the present. I shall not, accordingly, attempt a formally systematic presentation of the subject, laying out its different departments and defining their limits and mutual relations. It will, I am persuaded, be more for our profit to discuss in a somewhat general and familiar way the fundamental facts in the life of language, those which exhibit most clearly its character, and determine the method of its study. We shall thus gain an insight into the nature of linguistic evidence, see how it is elicited from the material containing it, and what and how