Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/275

grand essential features, the same; that their structure is homogeneous throughout. There is no reason whatever for our assuming that the later composite forms are made up, and not the earlier; that the later suffixes are elaborated out of independent elements, and not the earlier. So far back as we can trace the history of language, the forces which have been efficient in producing its changes, and the general outlines of their modes of operation, have been the same; and we are justified in concluding, we are even compelled to infer, that they have been the same from the outset. There is no way of investigating the first hidden steps of any continuous historical process, except by carefully studying the later recorded steps, and cautiously applying the analogies thence deduced. So the geologist studies the forces which are now altering by slow degrees the form and aspect of the earth's crust, wearing down the rocks here, depositing beds of sand and pebbles there, pouring out floods of lava over certain regions, raising or lowering the line of coast along certain seas; and he applies the results of his observations with confidence to the explanation of phenomena dating from a time to which men's imaginations, even, can hardly reach. The legitimacy of the analogical reasoning is not less undeniable in the one case than in the other. You may as well try to persuade the student of the earth's structure that the coal-bearing rocks lie in parallel layers, of alternating materials, simply because it pleased God to make them so when he created the earth; or that the impressions of leaves, the stems and trunks of trees, the casts of animal remains, shells and bones, which they contain, the ripple and rain-marks which are seen upon them, are to be regarded as the sports of nature, mere arbitrary characteristics of the formation, uninterpretable as signs of its history—as to persuade the student of language that the indications of composition and growth which he discovers in the very oldest recorded speech, not less than in the latest, are only illusory, and that his comprehension of linguistic development must therefore be limited to the strictly historical period of the life of language. It is no prepossession, then, nor à priori theory, but a true logical