________________
LECTURE III.
I readily admit that there is no hurry for pronouncing definitely on these problems, and I am well aware of what may be said against these wide generalisations affecting the origin of species' in language. My chief object in publishing, more than twenty years ago, my Letter to Bunsen ‘On the Turanian Languages,' in which these views were first put forward, was to counteract the dangerous dogmatic scepticism which at that time threatened to stop all freedom of research, and all progress in the Science of Language. No method was then considered legitimate for a comparative analysis of languages except that which was, no doubt, the only legitimate method in treating, for instance, the Romance languages, but was not therefore the only possible method for a scientific treatment of all other languages. No proofs of relationship were then admitted even for languages outside the pale of the Aryan and Semitic families, except those which had been found applicable for establishing the relationship between the various members of these two great families of speech. My object was to show that, during an earlier phase in the development of language, no such proofs ought ever to be demanded, because, from the nature of the case, they could not exist, while yet their absence would in no way justify us in denying the possibility of a more distant relationship. At present a complete change has taken place in the Science of Language, as in other branches of natural science. Owing chiefly to the influence of the ideas which Darwin has brought again into the foreground of all natural philosophy, students are now directing their attention everywhere to the general rather than to the special. Every kind of change, under the name
