Furthermore, important as these still unsettled questions are from a purely philological point of view, they are not of any great moment from that of the evolutionist, as I have already observed. For, so long as it is universally agreed that all the language-groups have been products of a gradual development, it is, comparatively speaking, immaterial whether the groups all stand to one another in a relation of serial descent, or whether some of them stand to others in a relation of collateral descent. That is to say, the evolutionist is under no obligation to espouse either the monotypic or the polytypic theory of the origin of language. Therefore, it will make no material difference to the following discussion whether the reader feels disposed to follow the doctrine, that all languages must have originated in such monosyllabic isolations as we now meet with in a radical form of speech like the Chinese; that they all originated in such polysynthetic incapsulations as we now find in the numberless dialects of the American Indians; or, lastly, and as I myself think much more probably, that both these, and possibly other types of language-structure, are all equally primitive. Be these things as they may, my discussion will not be overshadowed by their uncertainty. For this uncertainty has reference only to the _origin_ of the existing language-types as independent or genetically allied: it in no way affects the certainty of their subsequent _evolution_. Much as philologists may still differ upon the mutual relations of these several language-types, they all agree that “von der ersten Entstehung der Sprachwurzeln an bis zur Bildung der volkommenen Flexionssprachen, wie des Sanskrit, Griechischen, oder Deutschen, ist Alles in der Entwicklung der Sprache verständlich.... Sobald nur die Wurzeln als die fertigen Bausteine der Sprache einmal da sind, lässt sich Schritt für Schritt das Wachsthum des Sprachgebäudes verfolgen.”[165] Therefore, having now said all that seems necessary to say on the question of language-types, I will pass on to consider the information that we possess on the subject of language-roots. First, let us consider the number of roots out of which languages are developed—or, rather, let me say, the number of elementary constituents into which the researches of philologists have been able to reduce those languages which have been most closely studied. Of course the probability—nay, the certainty—is that the actual number of roots must in all cases be considerably less than philologists are now able to prove.