The history of these roots _dâ_ affords an opportunity of noticing a curious resemblance between natural history and philology, two sciences which otherwise are totally different, but alike in one idea which enters into the inwardness of both. Darwin admitted four or five progenitors in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so that the primary elements of all living organisms are the simple cells. In the same way philologists have discovered that there remain in the end certain simple elements of human speech--the primordial roots--which have sufficed to provide the innumerable multitude of words used by the human race. A principle neglected by a great number of evolutionists is that if two origins, whether the roots of language or living cells, have at their starting-point an absolutely similar appearance, and afterwards diverge, it is because at their origin they bore in themselves the germs destined to produce this divergence. Darwin says that two organic cells, which in the embryonic stage may perfectly resemble each other, in growing, gradually develop, the one into an inferior animal, the other into a superior animal, never varying the process; the reason of which fact is that the cells, although not distinguishable the one from the other, differ in the rudiments or principle of life: in the same way philologists say that when two roots have the same sound, but produce families of perfectly distinct words, it is because the germs in each differ. We learn from this that the sound of the words is a matter of indifference at the commencement of a language; no one has succeeded, or will succeed, in making the sound alone the vehicle of a conception. To Locke belongs the merit of having first clearly asserted that roots, the true irreducible elements of language, which furnish words for the most abstract and sublime conceptions, had at the beginning only a material or sensuous meaning, and this fact, on which idealists and materialists are agreed, is confirmed by comparative philologists. All primitive roots express directly only those acts and those conditions which come under the domain of the senses; all express the consciousness of repeated acts familiar to the members of a society in its infancy, such as pounding, striking, weaving, tying, burning, rubbing, moving, cutting, sharpening, softening. By means of generalisation and specialisation, the roots have acquired the most abstract terms of our advanced society; thus the root to burn developed into the thought of to love, and also to be ashamed; to dig, came to mean to search for, to enquire; the root which means to gather, expressed in primitive logic what we now call observation of facts; the connection of major and minor, or even syllogism. This is without doubt, and it is as certain that the words rake and pinchers came from the verbs to rake and to pinch.