It has been asserted that in these two Aryan branches must we look for our ancestors. How shall we verify the truth of this assertion? What family likeness must we seek in order to recognise the relationship? How feel certain that the languages we speak have been derived from them? “If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin--if no historical documents existed to tell us of the Roman empire--a mere comparison of the six Romance dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common.”[23] Let us conjugate the verb _to be_ in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Walachian, and in Rhætian, and we shall see that it is clear: first, that all are but varieties of one common type: secondly, that it is impossible to consider any one of these six dialects as the original from which the others had been borrowed, since no single one contains the elements composing them. “If we find such forms as _j’ai aimé_, we can explain them by a mere reference to the grammatical materials which French has still at its command, and the same may be said of _j’aimerai_, i.e. _je-aimer-ai_, I have to love, I shall love. But a change from _je suis_ to _tu es_ is inexplicable by the light of French grammar; it must have been a part of some language antecedent to any of the Romance dialects; it is, in fact, the verb _to be_ in Latin, which solves this difficulty; each of the six paradigms is but a metamorphosis of the Latin.”[24] It was known that the roots were the same in all the Aryan languages, that the same grammatical changes were common in many of the words in everyday use, such as father, mother, heaven, sun, moon, horse, and cow, as well as in the principal numbers; but it was the study of Sanscrit in its primitive form which first led the learned to the discovery of the reason of the vowel changes in certain words in use in our day, and which changes the English word _to wit_, to know, into _I wot_, I know, and the German _ich weise_ into _wir wissen_; these changes are the result of a general law, the application of which can nowhere be more clearly appreciated than in the Vedic Sanscrit, and which was unknown until this language was studied in the Veda. (I will here note that Sanscrit not being the original from which the other Aryan dialects have their being, but an elder brother, when Max Müller makes use of a Sanscrit phrase he does it to give an idea of the process through which the language has passed which he considers preceded Sanscrit.)