illustration may serve to point the contrast in this respect between the present time and even thirty-five years ago. It was about then that a very clever and very laborious Englishman published a work on which he had spent years. It was called "The One Primeval Language," and was intended to show that the inscription on the Sinaitic Rocks could be translated back into this one primeval language by means of a correspondence with the Arabic alphabet, which the author had devised on purely hypothetical grounds. One, at least, of the acutest judicial minds of that day—the late Lord Lyndhurst—was quite convinced by this process. On the other hand, M. Renan has described it as a mystification anglaise. It would not be possible now for a clever and learned man, as this man was, to produce such a work: the scientific feeling in linguistic matters has become too widely diffused.
Surely, you will say, it is a matter for rejoicing that the scientific spirit has thus entered the domain of scholarship, and has thus changed the reign of caprice to the reign of law. Of course it is so in the main: without that spirit the gains of the last fifty years could not have been won. But there is another aspect of the matter on which I should like to say a few words, for it is too often forgotten. It cannot be doubted that the analogy of the natural sciences has indirectly helped the tendency towards a scientific rigour in the provinces of scholarship at which we have glanced. The whole atmosphere of our century has been charged with the influences of science—-
