Still more extraordinary is the listlessness with which during all the centuries that have elapsed since the first names were given to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field, men have passed by what was much nearer to them than even the gravel on which they trod, namely, the words of their own language. Here, too, the clearly marked lines of different strata seemed almost to challenge attention, and the pulses of former life were still throbbing in the petrified forms imbedded in grammars and dictionaries. Yet not even a Plato had eyes to see, or ears to hear, and the conception of a science of language, of Glottology, was reserved for the nineteenth century. I am far from saying that Plato and Aristotle knew nothing of the nature, the origin, and the purpose of language, or that we have nothing to learn from their works. They, and their successors, and their predecessors too, beginning with Herakleitos and Demokritos, were startled and almost fascinated by the mysteries of human speech as much as by the mysteries of human thought; and what we call grammar and the laws of language, nay, all the technical terms which are still current in our schools, such as _noun_ and _verb_, _case_ and _number_, _infinitive_ and _participle_, all this was first discovered and named by the philosophers and grammarians of Greece, to whom, in spite of all our new discoveries, I believe we are still beholden, whether consciously or unconsciously, for more than half of our intellectual life.