'The four or five hundred roots which remain as the constituent elements in different families of languages are not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are _phonetic types_, produced by a power inherent in nature. They exist, as Plato would say, by nature; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of God. There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less perfect structure of metals by their vibrations, by the answer which they give. Gold rings differently from tin, wood rings differently from stone; and different sounds are produced according to the nature of each percussion. It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works. Man, in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoieia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct. So far as language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. His senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they become useless. Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled. The number of these _phonetic types_ must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of _natural elimination_ which we observed in the early history of words, that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type.' Professor Max Mueller occupies a commanding position in the foremost rank of the students of Philology. His work on _The Science of Language_, from which the preceding discussion of the Origin of Speech is taken, is, so far as I am aware, the latest volume treating of the problem in question which has issued from what is commonly regarded as high authority in the department of Language. It is to that volume, therefore, that we are to look for the last word of elucidation which the Comparative Philologist can furnish respecting it. And it is for this reason--in order that we might have before us the results of the latest research of the schools--that the exposition of the Origin of Language given in the work referred to has been so fully stated.