Even in the present day, Moffat informs us that in South Africa the separation of parts of a tribe, for even a few months, may produce a notable difference of dialect. If we take the existing languages of civilized men whose history is known, we shall find that it is impossible to trace many of them back as far as the Christian era, and when we have passed over even half that interval, they become so different as to be unintelligible to those who now speak them. Where there are exceptions to this, they arise entirely from the effects of literature and artificial culture. While, therefore, there is good ground in philology for the belief in one primitive language, there seems no absolute necessity to have recourse even to the confusion of tongues at Babel to explain the diversities of language.[132] Farther, the Bible carries back the Semitic group of languages at least to the time of the Deluge, but it does not seem necessary on the mere ground of antediluvian names, to carry it any farther back, and the Assyrian inscriptions show the coexistence of Turanian and Semitic tongues at the dawn of history in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris. One or other of these--or a monosyllabic language underlying it--was probably an antediluvian tongue, and the other a very early derivative; and both history and philology would assign the precedence to the Turanian language, which was probably most akin to that which had descended from antediluvian times, and which at that early period of dispersion indicated in the Bible story of Babel, had begun to throw off its two great branches of the Aryan and Semitic languages. These, proceeding in two dissimilar lines of development, continue to exist to this day along with the surviving portions of the uncultivated Turanian speech. To this point, however, we may return under another head. CHAPTER XIV. UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN--(_Continued._) "By the word of God the heavens were from of old, and the earth, formed out of water, and by means of water, by which waters the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."--2 Peter iii., 5, 6.