been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now. But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar. Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such as _Pânini_ have systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really constituted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.(46) With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?