In now turning to this important branch of my subject, I may remark _in limine_ that, like all the sciences, philology can be cultivated only by those who devote themselves specially to the purpose. My function, therefore, will here be that of merely putting together the main results of philological research, so far as this has hitherto proceeded, and so far as these results appear to me to have any bearing upon the “origin of human faculty.” Being thus myself obliged to rely upon authority, where I find that authorities are in conflict—which, I need hardly say, is often the case—I will either avoid the points of disagreement, or else state what has to be said on both sides of the question. But where I find that all competent authorities are in substantial agreement, I will not burden my exposition by tautological quotations. Among the earlier students of language it was a moot question whether the faculty had its origin in Divine inspiration or in human invention. So long as the question touching the origin of language was supposed to be restricted to one or other of these alternatives, the special creationists in this department of thought may be regarded as having had the best of the argument. And this for the following reasons. Their opponents, for the most part, were unfairly handicapped by a general assumption of special creation as regards the origin of man, and also by a general belief in the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. The theory of evolution having been as yet unformulated, there was an antecedent presumption in favour of the Divine origin of speech, since it appeared in the last degree improbable that Adam and Eve should have been created “with full-summed powers” of intellect, without the means of communicating their ideas to one another. And even where scientific investigators were not expressly dominated by acceptance of the biblical cosmology, many of them were nevertheless implicitly influenced by it, to the extent of supposing that if language were not the result of direct inspiration, it can only have been the result of deliberate invention. But against this supposition of language having been deliberately invented, it was easy for orthodox opponents to answer—“Daily experience informs us, that men who have not learned to articulate in their childhood, never afterwards acquire the faculty of speech but by such helps as savages cannot obtain; and therefore, if speech were invented at all, it must have been either by children who were incapable of invention, or by men who were incapable of speech. A thousand, nay, a million, of children could not think of inventing a language. While the organs are pliable, there is not understanding enough to frame the conception of a language; and by the time that there is understanding, the organs are become too stiff for the task, and therefore, say the advocates for the Divine origin of language, reason as well as history intimates that mankind in all ages must have