Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/69

II.] individual variation and natural selection, the unity of origin of animal life—all are closely akin with those which the linguistic student has constant occasion to treat. We need not here dwell further upon the comparison: it is so naturally suggested, and so fruitful of interesting and instructive analogies, that it has been repeatedly drawn out and employed, by students both of nature and of language.

Once more, a noteworthy and often-remarked similarity exist between the facts and methods of geology and those of linguistic study. The science of language is, as it were, the geology of the most modern period, the Age of Man, having for its task to construct the history of development of the earth and its inhabitants from the time when the proper geological record remains silent; when man, no longer a mere animal, begins by the aid of language to bear witness respecting his own progress and that of the world about him. The remains of ancient speech are like strata deposited in bygone ages, telling of the forms of life then existing, and of the circumstances which determined or affected them; while words are as rolled pebbles, relics of yet more ancient formations, or as fossils, whose grade indicates the progress of organic life, and whose resemblances and relations show the correspondence or sequence of the different strata; while, everywhere, extensive denudation has marred the completeness of the record, and rendered impossible a detailed exhibition of the whole course of development.

Other analogies, hardly less striking than these, might doubtless be found by a mind curious of such things. Yet they would be, like these, analogies merely, instructive as illustrations, but becoming fruitful of error when, letting our fancy run away with our reason, we allow them to determine our fundamental views respecting the nature of language and the method of its study; when we call language a living