The tracing of the growth of words which has been scientifically—that is, historically and logically—prosecuted for a little more than fifty years, has brought to light the important fact—a fact the discovery of which is second in importance only to that of the discovery of the law of gravitation—that all the languages of the civilized peoples of Europe and America, together with some in Asia, have a common origin. At one time there was no English, no French, no German, no Russian language, no Erse or Gælic, no Latin, no Greek; but at that time the germ of all these languages, and of others which need not be mentioned, existed in a tongue which for more than four thousand years has been unspoken, but which from the people who spoke it has been called Aryan (pronounced _Ahrian_). This discovery was sure to have been made in one way or another; but the immediate cause of it was the presence in Hindostan of the British East India Company. In 1776, N. B. Halhed, a servant of that company, who had been an early friend of Sheridan, the orator and dramatist, published a Bengali grammar, in which he mentions as very remarkable, “the similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic (?), and even of Latin and Greek; and these not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced, but in the main groundwork of the language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such things as would be first discriminated on the first dawn of civilization.” Soon afterward, in 1786, Sir William Jones, who had gone to Bengal as a judge, in a paper in “Asiatic Researches,” expressed a like opinion more strongly and in more comprehensive terms. “The Sanskrit language,” he says, “whatever may be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar[B] than could have been produced by accident, so strong that no philologer could examine all the three without believing them to have sprung from one common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.”