America, spent some years in England, residing with an unmarried sister, soliciting office from the government, and endeavoring to bring under its notice an invention which he hoped was of great value. After weary years, both schemes were abandoned. He withdrew to the island of Guernsey, and in 1831, in the sixty-third year of his age, in poverty, but solaced by the affectionate care of his one constant friend, he sank to his rest.

Mrs. Blennerhasset was now left alone in her old age, to support and educate three children. After eleven years of toil, she returned to the United States in the hope of obtaining from the government reparation for the injury done to her property, in the winter of 1806, in the name of the government, by officers acting under its authority. Henry Clay presented her petition in the federal Senate. The committee appointed to examine it reported that the claim was legal and proper, and that not to allow it would be unworthy a wise or just nation. It would, doubtless, have been granted; but while Congress were discussing it, she died in an humble abode in New York, soothed in her last hours by the charitable attentions of a society of Irish females.

Part I.

Africa.

ART. VIII.1. On the Present State and Recent Progress of Ethnographical Philology. By R. G. LATHAM, M. D. pp. 66.

2. On the Various Methods of Research which contribute to the Advancement of Ethnology, and of the Relations of that Science to Other Branches of Knowledge. By JAMES C. PRICHARD, M. D., F. R. S. &c. Pp. 24. 3. On the Results of the Recent Egyptian Researches in Reference to Asiatic and African Ethnology, and the Classification of Languages: A Discourse read before the Ethnological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford, on the 28th of June, 1847, by C. C. J. BUNSEN, D. C. L., Ph. D. pp. 46.

4. On the Importance of the Study of the Celtic Language

as exhibited by the Modern Celtic Dialects still extant. BY DR. CHARLES MEYER. pp. 18.

By

5. On the Relation of the Bengali to the Arian and Aboriginal Languages of India. By DR. MAX MÜLLER. pp. 32.

THE treatises whose titles are here given are all contained in the "Reports of the British Association" for the year 1847; and, together with a few shorter contributions on kindred subjects, occupy just two hundred pages, or about a third part of the whole volume.

It is our present design to recall the attention of our readers to the scientific character and value of linguistic researches, and especially to their bearing upon the vexed question of the unity of the human race. And as the very connection in which these treatises have been published indicates the position which the British, as well as the German, scientific world have been disposed to accord to philological inquiries, we have chosen to place them at the head of our article rather than any more recent productions.

We are aware that it has become fashionable to treat such studies as dry and trite, and even to reject them as puerile. To scoff at etymology is no new thing; and efforts are sometimes made to decry all philological investigations as, in a scientific point of view, entirely unproductive and inconclusive. We are constrained, therefore, to beg pardon for our present intrusion; but, with Minerva, Mercury, Apollo, and the Muses on our side, we hope we shall not be denied a hearing by the votaries of Ceres, Neptune, and Vulcan.

So far as those opinions relate to the inutility of the study of language, they are neither to be received nor rejected without a fair, open, and full consideration. But as to the want of interest attaching to such studies, its basis is unquestionably quite as much subjective as objective.

To most men, the details of routine and appliances in the painter's or the sculptor's art would seem exceedingly dry and wearisome. But a Venus of Praxiteles, a Madonna of Raphael, or the Greek Slave of Powers was not a mere improvisation, an extempore product of inspired genius, without tools or practice, or rules of art. Patient study of details, a perfect mastery of innumerable technical minutiæ, as well as

diligent observation and long reflection, were essential antecedent conditions of such a glorious creation. To the true artist, the study of those minutiæ and details, instead of being rejected as irksome or despised as trifling, becomes ennobled by its connection with the ultimate result. Here, the end sanctifies the means.

Not in marble or on canvas only; in language, too, human genius has manifested its power; and nowhere is its impress more characteristic, more effective, more enduring. Poetry and eloquence, history and philosophy, are among the forms of such a manifestation. Language itself, in its very structure and development, is the noblest and most characteristic, the most direct and perfect, manifestation of the human mind. Hence the study of language has a humanizing tendency; it is the study of man, not indeed in his material and animal relations, but in his proper and peculiar character as an intellectual and logical, or rational, being.

In these later times, the study of the Natural Sciences has drawn to itself more and more of the intellectual activity of thinking and studious men throughout the sphere of Christian civilization, until at length it threatens to swallow up the mind of Christendom at least of Protestant Christendomaltogether. It has already arrayed on its side the large majority, probably, of the greatest minds of the age; and this gives it now the prestige which formerly belonged to the department of Letters, Philosophy, and Theology. Men are gradually coming to think, or rather have already come to think, that no study can be so noble or so useful as that of external nature.

We would not detract one tittle from the dignity or value of physical science. It has played a noble part in the elevation of the human mind, and we trust, is destined to play a yet nobler. But we cannot see, after much reflection bestowed upon the subject, why the study of a word of human speech, in its origin, history, connections, relations, and significance, is not, in itself and in its results, as worthy and as useful an employment as the examination of a shell, a pebble, a bug, or a worm.

The worthiness may be, as we have said, chiefly a matter of taste; but as useful, we say. A man may be an excellent baker, a skilful smith or miner, without being a scientific chemist. He may know how to train an ox or a horse,

or to distinguish a sheep from a goat, or to defend his fruits or crops from the cut-worm, the weevil, or the curculio, without a very thorough acquaintance with Zoology. And when, in the single department of Entomology, there are already found more species than man can number, what can be the great use, either practically or even philosophically, of adding one new bug to the number? If one had collected specimens of all the bugs in the world, and invented or stored in his memory a learned Greek name for each; or even had every individual bug been brought to him as soon as it was born, and all duly classified, and arranged in glittering files; it is difficult to see how much the wiser he would be for such a treasure, a thorough and minute acquaintance with which he could not gain were he to live to the good old age of Methuselah, nor convey the details to the world in as many volumes as are contained in the National Library of Paris. Nor is it easy to see to what purpose all this knowledge could be turned, even if it were once acquired and recorded. Certain selections and general views might be scientifically of use, but the measureless mass of particulars must surely frighten any but a most devout amateur of bugs.

It may be suggested, leaving for the moment the argument of utility, and returning to that of inherent dignity, that the leaf, the pebble, or the insect, is a work of God; the word a work of man. But is the former any more truly a work of God than the latter? The former is a work of God through the formative processes of natural law or of animal life; the latter is a work of God through the higher laws which regulate the development of intellectual and moral life. If the word were a mere arbitrary product of human ingenuity, there might be more pertinency in the suggestion; but while it is no such arbitrary product, but is either the original and immediate creature and gift of God, or the normal, natural, and necessary offspring and result of the mental constitution and physical organization of man, the force of such a suggestion is utterly annihilated. As well might the human infant be arranged, as a work of man, side by side with the automaton, and thus unceremoniously placed below the bug or the calf.

That the history of a word in the development of its forms and its significance is connected with mental rather

than with merely physical processes, the same being processes, still, not of ingenious contrivance or of arbitrary volition or convention, but in the highest sense natural and subject to profound and harmonious laws, is surely no detraction. from its character or diminution of its dignity as a work of God. And that character and dignity are rather enhanced than impaired by the fact that such a development is not a mere instinctive development, but is connected with and modified by the profoundest movements of a conscious mind, made itself after the image of God, and whose laws of evolution. and action are of higher interest and dignity and importance, as a subject of human study, than those pertaining to any other, even the grandest, works of the Creator's power, so far as those works are subject to our cognizance. Indeed, human language may be considered not so much the offspring, or the organ of communication, as the embodiment, the proper manifestation, of the human soul. It reveals to us all we know of other human souls, and probably all, or nearly all, that each of us knows of his own. Certain it is that, so far as experience can serve to determine the fact, we could not suppose human consciousness to be developed to any great extent in its intellectual or moral character, whether in the race or in the individual, without the development and the use of language. Language itself is a far greater work than any of the great works which it contains. The man who would argue down logic, and talk language into disrepute as meaningless, or at least conveying no definite and certain sense, may be left to contend with his own shadow. He will most effectually demolish his own forces.

Physical science has penetrated the heavens, we may say literally, to inconceivable depths, and determined with amazing precision the motions and the mechanism of the systems of bodies which roll in order through the vast expanse; and, what is more amazing still, she has found those motions and that mechanism to be in exact accordance in many cases with the prophetic anticipations of human reason, and always with the mathematical laws and principles which form a portion of its essential constitution. She has penetrated the crust of the earth with her divining rod, and, disinterring generation after generation of organisms that, one after another, have possessed the lordship of this terrestrial sphere, and, one after another,