Blair Collection > Vestigia celtica

15
reader is not at all impossible. But yet I
venture, in all soberness of mind, to submit
that it furnishes, out of the living present,
much that may help us to understand, and
mayhap rehabilitate, the dead exuviae of the
past. As in the teeming forms of lower
life the biolog-ist finds the analoo^ues of
man's foetal growth and development, so
may the student of language, through the
living speech of the Highlander, here study,
as it were, at once the embryology and
morphology of Language in general, and so
expect to extend and greatly to fertilise
the whole domain of philology.
And be it remembered that whatever
thus helps us to decipher the ancient coin-
forms of human expression, in word, phrase,
idiom, or inflection, affords also a sugges-
tion, at the least, for estimating their primi-
tive mioney's worth in human thought.
The wide field here opened up to view
is not only of great extent, but it presents
to us a great variety of aspects. Within
the limits of these chapters I can attempt
to explore of that wide field but one definite