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Show 60 THE DESCENT OF MAN. PART L formation. The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. We have in both cases the reduplication of parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth. The frequent presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more remarkable. The letter m in the word am, means I; so that in the expression I am~ a superfluous and useless rudiment has been retained. In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. Alanguage, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together.43 "\Ve see variability in every tongue, and new words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Muller 44 has well remarked:-" A struggle for "life is constantly going on amongst the words and gram" matical forms in each language. The better, the "shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the "upper hand, and they owe their success to their own "inherent virtue." To these more important causes of th~ survival of certain words, mere novelty may, I thmk, be added; for there is in~the mind of man a strong love for slight changes in all things. The survival or • 43 Se~ remar~s to this effect by the Rev. F. "\V. Farrar, in an interestmg arhcle, entitled ''Philology and Darwinism" in • Nature' l\iarch 2-Hh, 1870, p. 528. ' H 'Nature,' Jan. 6th, 1870, p. 257. CHAP. II. MENTAL POWERS. 61 preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. The perfectly regular and wonderfully complex ~onstruction of the languages of many barbarous natwns has often been advanced as a proof, either of the divine origin of these languages, or of the high art and former civilisation of their founders. Thus F. von Schlegel writes: "In those languages which appear to be at the "lowest grade of intellectual culture, we freque~tly o~" serve a very high and elaborate degree of art m th:Ir "grammatical structure. Thi.s is especially the case with "the Basque and the Lappoman, and many of the Arne" rican languages." 45 But it is assuredly an err~r to sp~ak of any language as an art in .the sense of Its h~vmg been elaborately and methodiCally form~d. Philol~gists now admit that conjugations, declensiOns, &c., originally existed as distinct words, since joi~ed toget~er; and as such words express the most obvwus relatiOns between objects and persons, it is not surprising that they should have been used ~y the men of mos~ r~ces during the earliest ages. :VIth respect to perf~ctlon, the following illustration will best shew how easily we may err : a Crinoid sometimes consists of ~o less than 150,000 pieces of shell/6 all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines; but a naturalist does not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, aud with none of these alike, excepting on the opposite sides of the bo:ly. He justly considers the differentiation and specialisation of organs as the test of perfection. So with languages, the most symmetrical and complex ought not to be ranked above irregular, abbre- 4l Qnoted by C. S. Wake,' Chapters on Man,' 1868, p. 101. 4G Buckland, 'Bridgewater Treatise,' p. 411. |