duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number: all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids _n_ and _ng._ There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages--you can trace about as much analogy between them--as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball. There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You know how the Latin _castrum_ became in English _ciaster_ and then _chester;_ the change was governed by law. The same law makes our present-day vulgar say _cyar_ for _car;_ that word, in the American of the future, will be something like chair. The same law makes the same kind of people say _donchyer_ for _don't you;_ some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American. Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said _Ts'in_ like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say _Ch'in._ So did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to do. So we ourselves have turned _Ts'in_ into _China._--And that is the one little fact--or perhaps one of the two or three little facts--that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin. But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan might some day--after millions of years--wear down or evolve back even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is _one thing;_ and all the differences, the changes rung on that according to the stages of evolution?