ruptions into language; and as the dispersion widened, and the Atlantic, the Baltic, and the Pacific became, respectively, the bourne and horizon of the wanderers, men whose ancestors had been on the same footing in regard to speech, colour, and frontal development, became Mongols, Tungusians, Mantchoos, and Samoyedes in Asia; Finns, Lapps, and Euskarians, in Europe; Negroes and Caffirs in Africa; and Red Indians in America. In a few cycles or generations after the peopling of the continent the Papuans, Tasmanians, and Polynesians, began to eat the bread-fruit, or chase the wild animals, of Polynesia.

The cultivation of the world has proceeded from three main sources, the Hebrew, the Hellenic, and the Teutonic races. Ethnology, however, regards all three as substantially one, and practically as two only. For the Semitic and Iranian stream flowed from the same Caucasian fountain-head; and the Greek and German races are only distantly settled and long-severed brethren.

"Close to the original birth-place of man," Dr. Donaldson remarks, "two sister-races formed themselves with equal qualifications both of body and mind, and divided between them in nearly equal proportions the great work of developing the human intellect. The geographical line of demarcation, the boundary-line and wall of partition between their first abodes, is furnished by the mountains of Kurdistan and the Persian Gulf. To the south and west of this the Aramaic race occupied at a very early period Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, and all the north of Africa. To the east the Iranian race was more slowly developing itself on the great western plateau of Asia, from whence it sent off successively streams of colonists, who carried the original language, and the original appetences for high mental cultivation, into India to the south-east, and round by the north coasts of the Caspian and Euxine into Europe."

So long as the varieties rather than the affinities of the human speech were the object of the philologer, it was natural and indeed easy to believe that no system or even theory could bring into one circle the idioms of the Iranian and Aramaic sections of mankind, still less those of the more scattered and disintegrated members of

the human family, the Turanian, Chinese and Polynesian dialects. The aim and scope of comparative grammar has now become, however, the discovery of contact and affinity; and the time is perhaps rapidly approaching when all discrepancies of idiom will appear inconsiderable, in their elements at least, and when the marks of a common origin and a family likeness will be as palpable as the basis of chemical bodies or the primitive phenomena of the geologist. The researches of Dr. Prichard and others have already reingrafted the Celtic and Semitic dialects on an Indo-Germanic stock, and rendered it probable that even the idioms of the Polynesians and American aborigines will be found to be integral particles of one central mass of speech-the speech which the primeval family employed in their first Armenian home. Some years ago two eminent philologists, A.W. von Schlegel and Bopp, concurred in recognizing three great families or classes of language. More recently, it has been thought convenient to divide all known languages into five different groups or dynasties. Dr. Donaldson, however, still prefers a tripartite division, which he further compresses into two groups, and designates them by what appear to us very accurate and expressive names.

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"The two groups may be called (A) the central and (B) the sporadic. Group (A) contains (1) the Iranian languages, corresponding to the Indo-Germanic, or Sanscrit family and (2) the Aramaic languages, corresponding to the Semitic or Syro-Arabian family. Group (B) (3) or the sporadic family, includes the Turanian, the Chinese, and all those other languages which were scattered over the globe by the first and furthest wanderers from the birth-place of our race. According to this arrangement, the first two families are classed together as constituting one group of languages closely re

lated in their material elements, and differing only in the state or degree of their grammatical development. The third family stands by itself, as comprising all the disintegrated or ungrammatical idioms."

We must turn aside from these very interesting ethnological details, and from the subtle analysis of the physiology of language which accompanies them. To ourselves, a branch, and, historically and psychologically speak

ing, the most distinguished branch, of the Teutonic stem, the fortunes and movements of the German race of emigrants are the most interesting, nor is the interest diminished by the fact that the Greeks who civilized the ethnic world, and the Germans who constitute the most cultivated portion of the Christian world, who espoused Christianity with an ardour and sincerity unknown to the effete Pagans of Italy and Hellas, and who by their assertion of the dignity of women introduced a new element into social life, were substantially not only offshoots of the same stock, but virtually also currents from the same stream of population. Dr. Donaldson thus concludes his account of the ethnical identity of the ancient Greeks with the Teutonic race. We much regret being enforced by our limits to omit entirely his history of the divarications of the great Teutonic stem.

"These resemblances (of language, social and intellectual structure) are still further confirmed by the appellations in which the Greeks and Germans equally delighted. We have seen above that the titles Mann, Herrmann, Germann, adopted by the eastern Teutons, indicated a predominance of the manly character, or that this race adopted a name particularly significant of their warlike temper. The same is the meaning of the word Hellene. Another special designation of the Eastern or High Germans is Thur-ing, which signifies highlander' or mountaineer.' We have found it combined with the

former appellation in the name of the Hermun-duri: and it appears by itself in the words Tyr-ol, Taur-us, Duro-triges, Dorset, and Taur-ini. Now this name again is a distinctive title of the genuine Northern Greeks, as opposed to the Pelasgians: for the Awp-iets or 'highlanders' are represented as descended from Apos the son of "EXλny, as well as their brethren the Aloλêts or mixed men,' and the "Ioves or coast-men. We can trace back this correspondence of ethnical nomenclature to the original sects of the Greek and German race in Asia. Immediately to the north of Greece, in the highest mountainland of Epirus, we recognise in the rpaî-o or Tрai-ko about Dodona, the element ger- of the word Ger-mann: and in the Θρακές to the west we have again the element Tor or Dor. It has been already mentioned that the Γερμάνιοι were a tribe of the ancient Persians. And we may, with a fair amount of probability,

maintain that the stream of High German or Greek emigration entered Europe by way of Asia Minor, and that its course may still be traced through the dry bed of obsolete proper names and shadowy tradition. Thus, to begin with the Hellespont, where Asia Minor and Europe are divided by a narrow strait, we find the well-known name of Tpów, in which the element Tor is still conspicuous, and in connexion with the same region we have the hero Dar-danus. Then again the Teutonic name appears in Teuta-mus, Teutheas, and the like. And Priamus and Paris, whose common name is best explained from the Persian, appear as the leaders of a confederacy which extended throughout the whole of Asia Minor, and gave a hand to the western borderers of Iran. The evidence for this chain of

ethnographic connexions is necessarily of a cumulative nature. Language, tradition, history, mythology, and, as far as this is applicable, those features in descriptive geography which influence the spread of population, enable us to trace the Græco-German race from the mountains of Karmania and Kurdistan through the north of Asia Minor and across the Hellespont into Thrace and Illyria. Nor do we stop here: for we may see how, in a strong but narrow stream, this warriorband forced its way through the Sclavonian and Low German tribes into the march-land of Vienna, and from thence gradually expanded itself along the Danube, until it had peopled or conquered the whole of the central plateau."

From general philology and ethnological speculation, Dr. Donaldson passes on to the more immediate subject of his work-the structure and physiology of the Greek language. Could we have exhibited, with any profit to the reader or any fairness to the author, any one of his disquisitions upon syntax, metre, or etymology, we should have preferred extracting from this portion of the New Cratylus, rather than from the preliminary chapters. But we can only afford to glance at the contents of a closely-printed volume of nearly seven hundred pages, and those pages devoted to the most subtle methe Hellenic language in particular. taphysics of language in general, and An analysis of the Greek alphabet, and a dissertation on the parts of speech, bring the first book to a close. The introductory chapter of the second book contains, perhaps, the most original discussion in the whole treatise, that

namely on pronominal words. The following chapters ascend from the subject of numerals and prepositions to the doctrine of the noun and verb, and from the theory of simple propositions to the most minute properties of the logic of language. It is not to be expected that many readers, not professedly students of philology, can or will follow the windings of these profound yet luminous discussions. Like Monsieur Jourdain, the majority of us are content with perspicuity of style, without greatly heeding how it can be attained, or the laws which regulate it. But for the scholar, who has knowledge enough of Greek to appreciate the delicacies and mysteries of grammar, and, above all, for the youthful student who would erect his knowledge from the first upon a sound basis, and by the light of lucid and comprehensive principles, the New Cratylus is a liber aureus, and, duly read, marked, and digested, will not only help to render the proficient secure, but, at the expense of a few months' labour, will furnish the novice with laws and analogies applicable, in the first instance, to the harmonious and versatile speech of the Greeks, and afterwards to any one of the great families of language which welled forth from the Armenian mother-fountain.

Philology isa plant of English growth, but not, in any extended sense, of English culture. Our scientific grammarians are indeed so few in number, that, like the trees of the prophetic forest, "a child may count them." Pace, the commentator on Aristotle, Camden, the antiquary, and Gataker, the editor of Marcus Aurelius and other learned works, make up nearly all the names of really eminent English philologers before the age of Bentley. With the great Aristarchus of Trinity College and the Dunciad began a new race of scholars in the Greek and Latin tongues, but England, at present, has hardly contributed its quota of profound and subtle thinkers to the science of general grammar. The present century, and, indeed, almost the present generation, has first directed research into this interesting and important province.

We may account for the paucity of really scientific treatises in philology in various ways. It has not been en

couraged at our elder universities. The London University is, we believe, the only academical body which boasts a Professorship of Comparative Philology. Oxford, with its prizes for Greek and Latin proficiency, and with its endowments for Oriental literature, has contributed little or nothing to linguistic science. In Anglo-Saxon it has left Mr. Kemble and Mr. Thorpe to do the work which might have been expected from the occupants of a university chair. Cambridge since the era of Newton has been absorbed by the studies of mathematics and physical science, and since the days of Porson has contributed much to Greek literature, and very little to any other department of the science of language. In the seventeenth century the men whom nature had qualified for philologers, the great questions of the time converted into theologians. The eighteenth century was occupied either with defending Christianity against the aggressions of French infidelity, or with adapting the philosophy of Locke and Paley to the spiritual demands of the age. The last century, indeed, either busied itself in the narrow circle of a philosophy of negation, or slumbered over the hoarded treasures of the Puritan controversy with the Church, or of the Protestant controversy with Rome. It might have been indeed expected that the researches of the Shakspere commentators would have given birth to a new and vigorous school of English philology. But those commentators were, with the excep tions of Farmer and Walter Whiter, men who might have been brained with a lady's fan, and who in the pile of notes collected in their final mass between the boards of Malone's Shakspere have left to posterity the most woful mausoleum of human dulness and misplaced ingenuity.

It is not probable indeed that any single generation, however addicted or however favourable to philological pursuits, should produce any considerable number of scientific linguists. It may give birth to more than one Mezzofante, since the gift of acquiring languages and dialects by no means involves the power of analysing their properties or detecting their analogies. But if it yields a single Bentley, it has probably exhausted its productiveness

as much as if it had produced an epic poet. Nor will this assertion be deemed hardy if we seriously weigh and take into account the qualities indispensable to a genuine professor of linguistic science.

Speculations on the origin, the texture, and the relations of language we possess in abundance. Indeed they are frequently as symptomatic of sciolism as of knowledge of the subject. For men take a deep and natural interest in the forms of language; but unfortunately they also have a greater zest for constructing theories of language, and, what is worse, for beginning to theorise before they have compiled either sufficient materials for the task, or dived to the root of universal phenomena and laws. The works of Harris of Salisbury and Lord Monboddo will suffice to explain the danger of premature theorising. They were for a brief while received as oracles; they have long slumbered on the shelves of large libraries, or amid the dust and defilements of bookstalls, side by side with Gébelin's Monde Primitif and Dr. Sacheverel's Trial. The true philologer aims at something distinct from specious theories of language. He obeys rigid laws of research; his experiments are made with the untiring zeal of a Wollaston and Davy, and his conclusions are little less certain than the laws which regu late matter, because, like those material laws, they are the result of a true Baconian method of investigation. But, in order to attain the precision which philology demands, a process resembling the method of the geometrician must be followed. There is nothing less arbitrary than language -at least than the language of those nations who have sustained and transmitted the civilisation of mankind. The speech of savages is indeed arbitrary, since the thought which gives birth to their words is undisciplined and inexact. But the speech of civilised man is, under all its phases, governed by laws little less certain than the laws which regulate the strata of the geologist or the operations of the chemist. Only these laws do not lie on the surface of language, but are for the most part hidden under depths

of transformation and under accretions of time which science alone can disinter and discriminate. Among the indispensable conditions therefore for a philologer, such as we have attempted to describe, is not only an analytic intellect of the subtlest character, but also a constructive intellect of the most active and diversified range. With the one he detects the mutations which speech has undergone; with the other he divines the form which it wore originally, when most perfect and flexible in its forms. But the union in one mind of the powers of analysis and synthesis is necessarily a rare endowment, and, consequently, while the tribe of grammarians is almost as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, the race of philologers is nearly as limited as that of epic or dramatic poets of the first order.

We are disposed to rank Dr. Donaldson among the race of genuine philologers. His New Cratylus exhibits many of the characteristics we have attempted to delineate. He is at once enterprising and cautious. His diligence in tracing the forms of language is unwearied; his sagacity in discerning likeness under the guise of diversity has rarely been surpassed. If we may judge by the specimens which the New Cratylus affords of his skill in enucleating the difficulties of the Greek language, we should pronounce him a most accurate metrist and verbal scholar; and, if we may judge by his wide and discursive analogies, we should describe him as combining with grammar an amount of comparative philology surpassed only by Bopp, Grimm, or Lepsius.

The New Cratylus indeed appears to us, so far as we have been able to examine and appreciate its contents, amply to justify the prognostications of the late Dr. Arnold, "that its learned author would one day produce a work on the science of language which would rank beside the most acute and elaborate performances of German erudition." That a work which the few rather than the many will consult should already have reached a second edition, must be regarded as one of the most favourable symptoms in the present condition of our native philology.