Some philologists hold that the primitive home of the Indo-European race cannot be determined, and incline to the opinion that the Asiatic representatives of the family emigrated from Europe into Asia. (_Consult Brugman’s “Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages,” p. 2._) THE SEMITES. =The Semitic Languages=, in like manner, may all be traced to a common source. To this group belong the Syriac, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Ethiopic, the ancient Phœnician, and the Carthaginian; while the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria are the written characters of a Semitic tongue common to those countries. (See Chart, p. 85.) Philology has not followed the Semites to a home as limited as that of the Aryans; though tradition points to Armenia as their early domicile, ethnological science to Arabia or Africa. It declares, however, the Semitic and the Aryan to be distinct forms of speech, perhaps branches of a common stem, but neither derivable from the other. THE TURANIANS. =Turanian Dialects.=—Here there is slighter evidence of relationship. The Turanian languages, though they seem to be members of the same original family, differ widely; for those who spoke them were nomads, wanderers over the globe, whose customs, laws, and dialects were modified with every change of habitation and condition. To this sporadic group belong the Mongolian tongues, the Turkish, Finnic, and Hungarian, together with certain Polynesian dialects; but the Chinese, Japanese, Australian, North American Indian, South African, and many others of the nine hundred languages spoken on the earth, bear hardly enough resemblance to these to be classed in the same family. SYSTEMS OF WRITING. =Language= is either spoken or written. Spoken language we find to have been used as a medium of communication between men in the earliest periods to which history carries us back. It is the expression of reason, and as such constitutes a line of demarcation between man and the lower animals. Without it, indeed, the brute can, to a certain extent, make known his emotions and desires. The house-dog, by the distinctive character of his bark, welcomes his master or threatens the intrusive stranger. The hen warns her chicks of danger by one set of signals, and calls them to feed by another. The ant, discovering an inviting grain too heavy for itself alone, bears the intelligence to its fellows and promptly returns with aid. But such limited means of communication fall infinitely short of the perfect system which is exclusively man’s birthright—which uses articulate sounds to represent ideas, and combines them so as to express every shade of thought.