ramifications bear quite as strong a testimony to the fact of their having been due to an organic growth, as is the testimony furnished by the branches of an actual tree. Or, to take another illustration. Classification of organic forms, as Darwin, Lyell, and Häckel have pointed out, strongly resembles the classification of languages. In the case of languages, as in the case of species, we have genetic affinities strongly marked; so that it is possible to some extent to construct a Language-tree, the branches of which shall indicate, in a diagrammatic form, the progressive divergence of a large group of languages from a common stock. For instance, Latin may be regarded as a fossil language, which has given rise to a group of living languages--Italian, Spanish, French, and, to a large extent, English. Now what would be thought of a philologist who should maintain that English, French, Spanish, and Italian were all specially created languages--or languages separately constructed by the Deity, and by as many separate acts of inspiration communicated to the nations which now speak them--and that their resemblance to the fossil form, Latin, must be attributed to special design? Yet the evidence of the natural transmutation of species is in one respect much stronger than that of the natural transmutation of languages--in respect, namely, of there being a vastly greater number of cases all bearing testimony to the fact of genetic relationship. But, quitting now this most general point of view--or the suggestive fact that what we have before us is a _tree_--let us next approach this tree for the purpose of examining its structure more in detail. When we do this, the fact of next greatest generality which we find is as follows.