speech to "the instincts of nature sharpened by the spur of necessity."

Now, casting the eye for a moment over the entire field, bringing together all the data gleaned from the foregoing historic review, also from the different and conflicting opinions cited, and from certain other correlated and established matters not yet introduced into this discussion, we reach, as among the more probable, the following inferences: - Human speech is both God-given and from human invention. The first man of the race was created with a complete physical organism and with powers of speech sufficiently perfect to answer all the requirements originally laid upon him. This primitive speech sprang from an internal impulse, but was volitional. The connection between speech and thought was therefore natural, and in a sense necessary. This original tongue, with which the first man was endowed, was bequeathed to his descendants, and was the only speech known on earth until within a few thousand years. Time enough has elapsed since the dawn of history to account for the differences found in Aryan speech, but not enough to account for the differences existing between the Aryan and either the Semitic or the Allophylian tongues. It follows, therefore, that resort must be had to a wholesale rejection, or reconstruction, of the generally received chronology, or else there must be found some direct agency which, in comparatively recent times, has wrought sudden and radical changes in human speech. In the only

history extant upon this subject is the record of an event which answers all the conditions demanded by the facts in the case. It took place within a few thousand years, it was sudden and violent, shattering human speech through a modification of the vocal organs. The record, under strict translation, reads thus (Gen. xi. 1-9):

"And the whole land was of one lip, and one stock of words. And it came to pass, as they journeyed eastward, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and asphalt had they for mortar.

"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower whose top may be in the sky, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the whole land. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of man had builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one lip, and this they have begun to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their lip, that they may not understand one another's lip.

"And the Lord scattered them abroad thence upon the face of all the land; and they left off to build the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel, because the Lord had there confounded the lip of all the land; and thence had the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all the land."

CHAPTER III.

LAWS OF SPEECH.

SPEECH, under a superficial review, seems erratic and lawless. Usage appears to be the only law; but usage is extremely fluctuating. If, however, speech is a divine gift, or a natural and necessary provision made for the human race, and that it is one or the other there can be no question, then it ought to be subject to the same laws as apply to other divine gifts, or to other natural and necessary provisions made for the race; in a word, speech ought to be governed by the same laws essentially as are found in force throughout the various domains of matter and mind. Upon the strength of such strong antecedent probabilities we may formulate a linguistic code of laws.

I. Law of Symbolization.

This law rests upon the principle that language is a symbol of thought; that words and sentences, as symbols, are originally chosen, not arbitrarily, but from some real or supposed connection or resemblance which they bear to the objects named. The important part played by this law in the forma

tion of English speech, already hinted, may be still further seen in the use of such imitative words as splash, bang, whiz, roar, hiss, and tick-tick.

Dr. Wilson enumerates the following words directly derived from so-termed "imitative dog-language": bark, yelp, howl, snap, snarl, whine, and whimper.

Names given by children (see p. 32), also the application of original imitative words to objects which have, or are supposed to have, some resemblance to those objects, as when the barnyard fowl is called the "cock-a-doodle-doo," from which come the cock of a gun, to cock one's eye or head, cocked hat, cockade, coquette, are illustrations of the working of this law of Symbolization.

The formation of new words from existing roots, such as side-saddle, butter-cup, break-fast, hearthstone, blood-money, foot-sore, and toil-worn, discloses this symbolizing propensity.

The same is true also of the metaphorical nature of language. "The etymologist," says Emerson,

"finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture." Examine the following words: application, understand, off-hand, news, blackguard, plagiarize, sarcastic, stigmatize, astonish, inculcate, respectable, scruple, sincere, calamity, cemetery.26

This law finds still further illustration in the tendency of language to symbolize the past. Language is fossil history. This is true of the general history of the race. Linguistic science is fast supplying

missing historic links. The words employed in remote antiquity are telling us more of the character and condition of the people than Herodotus ever dreamed.

The Indo-European family, through its word-history, is found in its earliest stages to have had its domestic circle; the words wife, mother, food, cooked, and table-spread, quietly lift the clouds from the past.

Such expressions as to Few one, to catch a Tartar, laconic, heathen, Celt, sterling, dunce, Essex, Middlesex, &c., also disclose in a striking manner national characteristics and surroundings. The following words, relating to ancient social polity: paper, library, diadem, robe, toilet, candidate, finance, pecuniary, salary, curfew, housewife, signing the name; also the following, which relate to early science: electricity, furlong, calculus, consider, disastrous; likewise the following, which bear upon religious history: hermetic, volcano, martial, jovial, vocation, devotion, plague, zounds, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, &c., are packed with historic import.27

The surnames of our English ancestry constitute a sort of family coat of arms. Individual history, even, is wrapped up in speech; it betrays the hearthstone at which the man lived or played.28

Not only are words selected, but sentences are often framed in obedience to the different requirements of this law. Thus, "The spray was hissing hot," is symbolic of the sound represented. The true