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Show 146 EARLY HISTORY JF MANKIN1 black. children in the valley o: the Jordan, ana tne com parahvely frequent birth of nd-haired children amongst not only Mongolian and Malavan famaies, but amongst the Negroes. We are ignorant ·of the laws of variety-production; but \Ve see it going on as a principle in nature, and it is obviously favorable to the supposition that all the great families. of men are of one stock. " The tendency of the modern study of the languages of nations is to the same point. The last fifty years have seen this study elevated to the character of a science. and the light which it throws upon the history of mankind is of a most remarkable nature. Following a natural analogy, philologists have thrown the earth's languages into a kind of classification: anumber bearing a considerable resemblance to each other and i~ ge!leral geographically ne.ar, are style~ a group, or'sub} f!-m'tly; several groups, again, are associated as aja1nily, . ' r w1th regard to more general features of resemblance. Six families are ~poken of. 11 Th~ Ind.o-~uro~ean family .nearly coincides in geo-graphical .ltmits with those whiCh have been assio-ned to that variety of mankind which generally shows a f~ir complexion, ca~led th.e Caucasian variety. It may be said to commence In Ind1a, and thence to stretch throuo-h Per~ia into Europe, the whole of ~hich it occupies, ~xcepting Hungar)> t~~ Basque provinees of Spain, and Finland. Its ~ub-famihes ~re the Sanscrit, or ancient language of India, the Persian, the Slavonic, Celtic Gothic and Pelasgi~n. The Slavonic includes the modern lang~ages of Ru~s1a .and Poland. Under the Gothic, are ( 1) the Scandinavian tongues, the N orske, Swedish and Danish· and (2) the Teutonic, to which belong the 'Modern Ger~ man, the Dutch, and our own Anglo-Saxon. I give the name of Pelasgian to the group scattered aloncr the north ~hores of the Mediterranean, the Greek and Latin includIng the modifications of the latter under the names of Italian Spanish, &c. The Celtic was, from two to three thousand years ago, the speech of a conside~·able tribe dwelling in Western Europe; but these have since been driven before superior nations into a few corners and are now only to be found in the highlands of Scotiand Ireland Wales Cornwall, and certain parts of :F'ranc;. The Gaelic oi ~c?tland, Erse of Ineland, and the "7V elsh, are the only L IVIng branches of this sub-fatr;ly of languages. EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 147 The re.3emblances among languages are of two kindsidentjfy of worus, and identity of grammatical forms; the latter being now generally considered as the most important tmvards the argument. When we inquire into the first kind of affinity arnong the languages of the IndoEuropean family, we are surprised at the great number of con1mon terms which exist among them, and these referring to such primary ideas as to leave no doubt of their having all been derived from a common source. Colonel Vans Kennedy presents nine hundred words common ·to the Sanscrit and other languages of the same family. In the Sanscrit and Persian, we find several Nhich require no sort of translation to an English reader; -as,pader, mader, sunu, dokhter, brader, mand, vidhava; likewise asthi, a bone, (Greek, ostourr. ;) denta, a tooth, (Latin, dens, dentis ;) eyeumen, the eye; brouwa, the eye-brow, (German, braue ;) nasa, the nose; karu, the hand, (Gr. cheir ;) genu, the knee, (Lat. genu;) ped, the foot, (Lat. pes, pedis;) hrti, the heart, jecur, the liver, (Lat. jecur ;) stara, a star; gel a, cold, (Lat. gelu, ice;) aghn-i, fire, (Lat. ignis;) dhara, the earth, (Lat. terra, Gaelic, tir ;) arrivi, a river; nau,, a ship, (Gr. na-us, Lat. navis;) ghatfl, a cow; sarpam, a serpent. The inferences from these verbal coincidertces were confirmed in a striking manner, V\rhen Bopp and others investigated the grammatical structure of this family of languages. Dr. w ·iseman pronounces that the great philologist jnst named, "by a minute and sagacious analysis of the Sanscrit verb, compared with the conjugational system of the other members of this family, left no doubt of their intimate and positive affinity" It was now discovered that the peculiar terminations or inflections by which persons are expressed throughout the verbs of nearly the whol~ of these languages, have their foundations in pronouns; the pronoun was simply placed at the end, and thus became an inflection "By an analysis of the Sanscrit pronouns, the elements of those existing in all the other languages were cleared of their anoma lies; the verb substant1ve, which in Latin is composed of fragments, referable to two distinct roots, here found both existing in regular form; the Greek conjugations, with all their complicated machinery of middle voice, augments, and redup~ications were here found an~· illustrated in a variety of ways, which a few years ag(JI would 1 |