Page:On the Stratification of Language - Muller - 1868.djvu/12

7 insects, while studying their forms, from the largest down to the smallest and almost invisible creatures, man has passed by this forest of speech, without seeing the forest, as we say in German, for the very number of its trees, (Man sah den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht,) without once asking how this vast currency could have been coined, what inexhaustible mines could have supplied the metal, what cunning hands could have devised the image and superscription,—without once wondering at the countless treasure inherited by him from the fathers of the human race?

Let us now turn our attention in a different direction. After it had been discovered that there was this great mass of material to be collected, to be classified, to be explained, what has the Science of Language, as yet, really accomplished? It has achieved much, considering that real work only began about fifty years ago; it has achieved little, if we look at what still remains to be done.

The first discovery was that languages admit of classification. Now this was a very great discovery, and it at once changed and raised the whole character of linguistic studies. Languages might have been, for all we know, the result of individual fancy or poetry; words might have been created at random, or been fixed by a convention, more or less arbitrary. In that case a scientific classification would have been as impossible as it is if applied to the changing fashions of the day. Nothing can be classified, nothing can be scientifically ruled and ordered, except what has grown up in natural order and according to rational rule. Out of the great mass of speech that is now accessible to the student of language, a number of so-called families have been separated, such as the Aryan,