Linguistic and ethnographic investigations, especially the linguistic works of the missionaries, long ago resulted in gathering rich material from the storehouse of the language of races now living, and the latest works in the realm of historical, etymological, and comparative philology had traced the branches and twigs of the better known languages to stems and roots lying far back. The result of the comparison soon became the same as in the realm of the organic world: what presented itself in the system of the living languages as a lower form, seemed to represent itself as the older and more original form also in the history of languages. Therefore, all the prominent linguistic investigators found themselves more and more urged to accept a theory which declares language, this entirely specific characteristic of man, to be subject to the same laws of development from the simpler and most simple forms as the world of the organic. Long ago so celebrated a man as Jacob Grimm,--"Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache" ("The Origin of Language"), Berlin, Duemmler--following the footsteps of Wilhelm von Humboldt, had established a theory, according to which language is "not created, but produced by the liberty of the human will;" and judging from many of his Darwinistic utterances concerning the origin and development of language, he had traced its development in such a way as to arrive at the conclusion that artless simplicity in the unfolding of the senses is the first period of its appearance. The scientists divide all the languages of the earth into three great groups: first, the monosyllabic, {96} isolating, radical, or asynthetic languages; second, the agglutinant, terminational, or polysynthetic languages; third, the inflectional languages. They are of the opinion that even the languages of highest rank--the inflectional--very probably took a starting-point from the asynthetic languages, and a course of development through the agglutinants, and that in like manner the agglutinants have behind them an asynthetic period. Thus they trace all the languages back to certain _roots_, which are more or less common to the different groups of languages. To the question that now arises--_How did these roots originate?_--the linguists give us three different answers. The onomatopoetic theory, called by Max Mueller the Wow-Wow Theory, traces them to imitations of the sound (W. Bleek, G. Curtius, Schleicher, Wedgewood, Farrar); the interjectional theory, called by Max Mueller the Pooh-Pooh, or Pah-Pah Theory, traces them to expressions of the senses (Condillac); a third theory declares the roots to be phonetic types (Max Mueller, Lazar Geiger, Heyse, Steinthal); while it is still an open question, whether the attempts at explanation of these types must here come to a stand-still for the present, as Max Mueller thinks, or whether, according to Lazar Geiger, we can trace the first root-expressions especially to impressions of light and color.