stitutional ability to endure a distribution from a single centre, to all climates.

Although all the languages of the world exhibit undoubted evidences of having originated from a common stem, yet the diversity of genius and structure in the three great original tongues, the Shemitic, Japhethic, and Canaanitic, when compared with each other, exhibit evidences of a disruption, of a nature so abrupt, that it can only be accounted for by the miraculous confusion recorded by Moses. In each great family, or species of men, the diversities of dialects have so strong a filiation that most of the important words of any the most modern tongue, may be traced through them all, by an expert philologist. This is especially true in respect to the Shemitic tongues, with which we are most familiar; and, so far as our limited knowledge extends, is equally true in regard to the other great families of languages, the Japhethic and Canaanitic. But, except in a few isolated instances, some of which we will presently detail, little or no etymological connexion can be traced between the three great original tongues. The Ishmaelitic language, on the contrary, bears the impression of the Shemitic family, because it originated in this family nearly four hundred years after the dispersion at Babel; thus furnishing another remarkable instance of the accuracy of the Mosaic history.

The customary distribution of the human family, -viz. the Japhethites in Europe and Western Asia, mingled with the Shemites; and the consequent filiation of the Shemitic and Japhethic tongues, appears to us to be not only unphilosophical, but con

trary to the Mosaic distribution,-" after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations." The physical characteristics of the great original families, or species of men, are also as diverse as their languages. But we have already examined Josephus's distribution of the Patriarchs, and will have occasion to refer to the subject hereafter; we will therefore close this chapter by an extract from Dr. Good's "Book of Nature," applicable to a single centre of distribution for the human family.

"There is in all languages of the earth a general unity of principle," says Dr. Good, p. 297, et seq., "which evidently bespeaks a general unity of origin; a family character and likeness which cannot possibly be the effect of accident. The common divisions and rules of one language are the common divisions and rules of the whole; and, hence, every national grammar is, in a certain sense, and to a certain extent, an universal grammar; and the man who has learned one foreign tongue, has imperceptibly made some progress towards a knowledge of other tongues. In all countries, and all languages, there is only one and the same set of articulations; or at least the dif ferences are so few, that they can scarcely interfere with the generality of the assertion: for diversities of language consist not in different sets of articulations, but only in a difference of their combinations and applications. No people have ever been found so barbarous as to be without articulate sounds, and no people so refined and fastidious as to have a desire to add to the common stock.

"But independently of an uniform circle of articu

lations, and an uniform system of grammar, there is also an uniform use of the very same terms in a great variety of languages, to express the very same ideas; which, as it appears to me, cannot possibly be accounted for, except upon the principle of one common origin and mother tongue; and I now allude more particularly to those kinds of terms, which, under every change of time, and every variety of climate, or of moral or political fortune, might be most readily expected to maintain an immutability; as those, for example, of family relationship and patriarchal respect; or descriptive of such other ideas as cannot but have occurred to the mind very generally, as those of earth, sky, death, deity."

We will not follow him through the details of the examples he has given to illustrate these positions. He has collected a number of words which run through all languages ancient and modern, civilized and savage. "Papa and Father;" "Al, Allah, Theus, or Deus, and God," "Mor, Most, or Mut" for death; "Sir" "Man" "Youth and Young," "Regent ;" "Name;" "Cow" and Mouse."-His remarks and illustrations upon these words are judicious and convincing, which he concludes as follows; "all, as I have already observed, confederating in proof that the various languages, and dialects of languages, that now are, or ever have been spoken, have originated from one common source; and that the various nations that now exist, or ever have existed, have originated from one common cradle or quarter of the globe, and that quarter an eastern region."

"Finally," he continues, p. 301, "and before I

close this argument, and deduce from it its fair and legitimate result, let me pointedly call your attention to that most extraordinary act of correspondence between all nations whatever, in all quarters of the globe, wherever any trace of the art exists, which is to be found in their employment of a decimal gradation of arithmetic; an argument which, though I do not know that it has ever been advanced before, is, I freely confess to you, omnipotent of itself to my own mind. Let me, however, repeat the limitation, wherever any trace of this art is found to exist; for in the miserable state to which some savage tribes are reduced, without property to value, treasures to count over, or a multiplicity of ideas to enumerate; where the desires are few and sordid, and the fragments of language that remain are limited to the narrow train of every-day ideas and occurrences, it is possible there may be some hordes who have lost the art entirely; as we are told by Crantz, is the case with the wretched natives of Greenland, and by the Abbé Chappé with some families among the Kamschatkadales; while there are other barbarian tribes, and especially those of America, who cannot mount higher in the scale of enumeration than five, ten, or a hundred and for all beyond this point to the hair of their head, as a sign that the sum is innumerable."

"But, putting by these abject and degenerated specimens of our own species who have lost the general knowledge of their forefathers, whence comes it to pass, that blacks and whites in every other quarter, the savage and the civilized, wher

ever a human community has been found, have never either stopped short of, nor exceeded, a series of ten in their numerical calculations; and that as soon as they have reached this number, they have uniformly commenced a second series with the first unit in the scale, one ten, two ten, three ten, four ten, till they have reached the end of the second series; and have then commenced a third with the next unit in rotation; and so on, as far as they have had occasion to compute? Why have not some nations broken off at the number five,· and others proceeded to fifteen before they commenced a second series? Or why have the generality of them had anything more than one single and infinitesimal series, and consequently, a new name, and a new number for every ascending unit? Such universality cannot possibly have resulted, except from a like universality of cause; and we have in this single instance alone, a proof equal to mathematical demonstration, that the different languages into which it enters, and of which it forms so prominent a feature, must assuredly have originated, not from accident, at different times, and in different places, but from direct determination and design, at the same time, and in the same place; that it must be the result of one grand, comprehensive, and original system. We have already proved that such system could not be of human invention; and what then remains for us but to confess peremptorily, and ex necessitate rei, as the fair conclusion of the general argument, that it must have been of divine and supernatural communication ?