Both invention, which is the genius of adaptation, and the blending influence of mere intercourse, may have their appropriate place as auxiliaries, in the reconstruction of human speech, in accordance with the exigencies of the new era which is dawning on the world; but there is another and far more basic and important element, which may, and perhaps we may say must, appear upon the stage, and enter into the solution. This is the element of positive Scientific _Discovery_ in the lingual domain. It may be found that every elementary sound of the human voice is _inherently laden_ by _nature herself_ with a primitive significance; that the small aggregate of these meanings is precisely that handful of the Primitive Categories of all _Thought_ and all _Being_ which the Philosophers, from Aristotle up to Kant, have so industriously and painfully sought for. The germ of this idea was incipiently and crudely struggling in the mind of the late distinguished philologist, Dr. Charles Kreitser, formerly professor of languages in the University of Virginia, and author of numerous valuable articles in Appletons' 'Cyclopaedia;' the most learned man, doubtless, that unfortunate Hungary has contributed to our American body of savans. This element of discovery may, in the end, take the lead, and immensely preponderate in importance over the other two factors already mentioned as participating in the solution of a question of a planetary language. The idea certainly has no intrinsic improbability, that the normal language of mankind should be matter of discovery as the normal music of the race has been already. There was an instinctual and spontaneous development of music in advance of the time when science acted reflectively upon the elements and reconstituted it in accordance with the musical laws so discovered. Why may we not, why ought we not even to expect, analogically, that the same thing will occur for speech? Setting aside, however, for the present occasion, the profounder inquiry into the inherent significance of sounds, and into all that flows logically from that novel and recondite investigation, we propose at present to treat in a more superficial way the subject indicated in the title of this article--A Universal Language; its Possibility, Scientific Necessity, and Appropriate Characteristics.