I may best be able to explain the view commonly held with regard to the strata of language by a reference to the strata of the earth. Here, too, where different strata have been tilted up, it might seem at first sight as if they were arranged perpendicularly and side by side, none underlying the other, none presupposing the other. But as the geologist, on the strength of more general evidence, has to reverse this perpendicular position, and to re-arrange his strata in their natural order, and as they followed each other horizontally, the student of language too is irresistibly driven to the same conclusion. No language can by any possibility be inflectional without having passed through the combinatory and isolating stratum; no language can by any possibility be combinatory without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation. Unless Sanskrit and Greek and Hebrew had passed through the combinatory stratum, nay, unless, at some time or other, they had been no better than Chinese, their present form would be as great a miracle as the existence of chalk (and the strata associated with it) without an underlying stratum of oolite (and the strata associated with it;) or a stratum of oolite unsupported by the trias or system of new red sandstone. Bunsen’s dictum, that “the question whether a language can begin with inflections, implies an absurdity,” may have seemed too strongly worded: but if he took inflections in the commonly received meaning, in the sense of something that may be added or removed from a base in order to define or to modify its meaning, then surely the simple argument _ex nihilo nihil fit_ is sufficient to prove that the inflections must have been something by themselves, before they became inflections relatively to the base, and that the base too must have existed by itself, before it could be defined and modified by the addition of such inflections.