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Conjectures increased and developed into systems, which, however, contained nothing beyond germs of fresh conjectures and fresh systems, of which none rested on a reasonable basis.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was quite natural that there should be uncertainty as to the path to be followed in seeking the beginning of human speech. Was it necessary to trace all the known languages to their source? Would not the same feeling of confusion arise when attacking all the dialects spoken on the surface of the earth as oppressed those who were at the base of the Tower of Babel? An idea which was universally adopted rather tended to check the progress of this study: it sprang from the theory that humanity had received the gift of speech from the Creator; and as the Jewish people alone were thought to be the recipients of a supernatural revelation, it followed that Hebrew must be the earliest language, and consequently that all existing languages were derived from the Hebrew. It is hardly possible to conceive the number of works put forth by the learned to remove any doubt with regard to this strange affiliation; the difficulty was to support or prove the supposition that Hebrew had given birth to Greek, Latin, and the rest; this Biblical language was tortured and twisted about in the endeavour to prove the descent of the others from it, but no satisfactory result was obtained. It was by the advice of Leibniz that as many facts as possible were collected concerning the modern languages then in use. He asked for the assistance of monarchs, European princes, ambassadors, missionaries, and travellers. It was during these investigations that the attention of certain philologists was directed to Sanscrit, a language which had been dead 300 years before the Christian era, and about which the learned in Europe had troubled themselves very little.