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Philology, the science which devotes itself to the study of language, has recently[7] arrived at results almost undreamed of by preceding centuries. Indeed, it received its most vigorous impulse from the acquaintance with the languages of India, and, above all, with Sanskrit, which, like so many other great blessings, directly resulted from our dominion in India. Already it has thrown new light on many of the most perplexing problems of religion, history, and ethnography; and, being yet but an infant science, it is in all probability destined to achieve triumphs, of which at present we can but dimly prophesy the consequences.[8]

Since the most ancient monuments of Sanskrit, Zend,[9] Hebrew, and in fact of all languages, are separated, perhaps by thousands of years from[9] the appearance of language (i.e., from the creation of the human race), it might seem impossible to throw any light on that most interesting of all considerations, the origin of language. And yet so permanent are the creations of speech, so invariable and ascertainable are the laws of its mutation, that the geologist is less clearly able to describe the convulsions of the earth’s strata than the philologist to point out, by the indications of language, the undoubted traces of a nation’s previous life. On the stone tablets of the universe, God’s own finger has written the changes which millions of years have wrought on the mountain and the plain; in the fluid air, which he articulates into human utterance, man has preserved for ever the main facts of his past history, and the main processes of his inmost soul. The sonorous wave, indeed, which transmits to our ears the uttered thought, reaches but a little distance, and then vanishes like the tremulous ripple on the surface of the sea; but, conscious of his destiny, man invented writing to give it perpetuity from age to age. Its short reach, its brief continuance, are the defects of the spoken word, but when graven on the stone or painted on the vellum it passes from one end of the earth to the other for all time; it conquers at once eternity and space.[10]