Far be it from me, therefore, to underrate the value of Aryan and Semitic scholarship for a successful prosecution of the Science of Language. But while doing full justice to the method adopted by Semitic and Aryan scholars in the discovery of the laws that regulate the growth and decay of language, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that our field of observation has been thus far extremely limited, and that we should act in defiance of the simplest rules of sound induction, were we to generalize on such scanty evidence. Let us but clearly see what place these two so-called families, the Aryan and Semitic, occupy in the great kingdom of speech. They are in reality but two centres, two small settlements of speech, and all we know of them is their period of decay, not their period of growth, their descending, not their ascending career, their Being, as we say in German, not their Becoming (_Ihr Gewordensein, nicht ihr Werden_). Even in the earliest literary documents both the Aryan and Semitic speech appear before us as fixed and petrified. They had left forever that stage during which language grows and expands, before it is arrested in its exuberant fertility by means of religious or political concentration, by means of oral tradition, or finally by means of a written literature. In the natural history of speech, writing, or, what in early times takes the place of writing, oral tradition, is something merely accidental. It represents a foreign influence which, in natural history, can only be compared to the influence exercised by domestication on plants and animals. Language would be language still, nay, would be more truly language, if the idea of a literature, whether oral or written, had never entered men’s minds; and however important the effects produced by this artificial domestication of language may be, it is clear that our ideas of what language is in a natural state, and therefore what Sanskrit and Hebrew, too, must have been before they were tamed and fixed by literary cultivation, ought not to be formed from an exclusive study of Aryan and Semitic speech. I maintain that all that we call Aryan and Semitic speech, wonderful as its literary representatives may be, consists of neither more or less than so many varieties which all owe their origin to only two historical concentrations of wild unbounded speech; nay, however perfect, however powerful, however glorious in the history of the world,--in the eyes of the student of language, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, are what a student of natural history would not hesitate to call “_monstra_,” unnatural, exceptional formations which can never disclose to us the real character of language left to itself to follow out its own laws without let or hindrance.