They have come from remotest periods. They have come from the night of history. There is nothing else in the world man has contact with that is so old, except the red earth beneath his feet, or so much part of his life. How they originated we know little more than of the beginning to be of the same red earth. Theories have been put forward. None have been agreed upon. We know primitive tongues were monolithic. They were built in gigantic squares, like the stone buildings of primitive peoples, the temples upon the Andes, in Peru, in Honduras for example, Yucatan, the pre-historic buildings of Guatamala, India, Egypt. Primitive men hurled at each other blocks of unhewn thought. The change that was in progress from that day to this was one of _making little_, disintegration. The rocks were wearing slowly away to sand. Now speech is broken. It is filled with tiny paste-like particles, inconsequential connectives, the worn, floating, detritus of years. In everyday speech we make use of sounds which our Aryan ancestors used at foot of the Himalayan Mountains in the childhood of man. Sanskrit _vritta_ (turn); Latin _vertire_; English _verse_. Sanskrit _Deva_ (God); Latin _deus_; English _divine_. These are very near the forms we use. As I explained before, I, of course, have no right to the word linguist. I read too few tongues. It has been used merely to explain interest in foreign literature, and because we have no intermediate word for exchange. Sir John Bowring boasted he could speak one hundred tongues and read fluently still another hundred. With it all he was a poor translator. To translate well there must be generous admixture of artist and native writer in the scholar. John Gregory in the English Seventeenth Century, read easily almost all the languages of the Orient in which a literature has been written; and Ethiopean, too, for good measure. There was a period in England of something resembling encyclopedic mind—like the Russian Eighteenth Century, to which there seemed to be no limit of acquirement. After that (to me) there came another and a seemingly different England, both in mind and nature. Its rare moment of creative power passed. Very likely I have no right to the following opinion. My guess, however, would be that languages had a common origin. Then came migration of peoples, life in widely separated localities, under different areas of pressure of changing climates, bringing new demands upon the body. This modified speech. This caused the word to be spoken differently. In this way, in long periods of time, regularly appearing, cumulative differences arose. In the first place, word was uttered to give imitation in sound of emotion. It was gesture made through another bodily medium. It was mind gesture through the throat. In almost all languages the word for mother expresses the same gesture. Arabic, _oom_. Russian _matushka_. Latin _mater_. English _mother_, and so forth.