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ment of that unsettled mass of speech, which, at a later stage, became more fixed and traditional,in the north, in Tungusic, Mongolic, Tataric, and Finnic, and in the south, in Faic, Malaic, Bhotiya, and Tamulic.
LECTURE III.
The reason why scholars have discovered no more than these two or three great families of speech is very simple. There were no more, and we cannot make more. Families of languages are very peculiar formations; they are, and they must be, the exception, not the rule, in the growth of language. There was always the possibility, but there never was, as far as I can judge, any necessity for human speech leaving its primitive stage of wild growth and wild decay. If it had not been for what I consider a purely spontaneous act on the part of the ancestors of the Semitic, Aryan, and Turanian races, all languages might for ever have remained ephemeral, answering the purposes of every generation that comes and goes, struggling on, now gaining, now losing, sometimes acquiring a certain permanence, but after a season breaking up again, and carried away like blocks of ice by the waters that rise underneath the surface. Our very idea of language would then have been something totally different from what it is now.
For what are we doing?
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We first form our idea of what language ought to be from those exceptional languages which were arrested in their natural growth by social, religious, political, or at all events by extraneous influences, and we then turn round and wonder why all languages are not like these two or three exceptional channels of speech. We might as well wonder why
