Blair Collection > History of the Celtic language

vm PREFACE.
turn our backs upon this hemisphere, and travel to
the East, to see the dawn of intellect, and there
listen to the efforts of infant humanity forming a
language ; we must learn the powers of their signs
and symbols — a giant alphabet— and attend to the
reduction of these rudiments to practice. In brief,
we must contemplate man as naked.
The doctrine advocated in the following pages
is not a new one ; the writer's mode of treating it,
perhaps, is. To those who never reflected upon
the subject, the arguments may appear astounding ;
but this is no disproof. Truth has oftentimes had
a whole world against her. When Pythagoras
first disturbed the unpbilosophical but secure opin-
ion, namely, that the earth stood still, and that
the sun rose and set merely to please earth's pom-
pous habitants, his doctrine was not only ridiculed,
but also persecuted. After him, however, when
eighteen centuries had elapsed, Copernicus took
it up — and, in process of time, a Kepler, a Galileo,
a Newton, and a Herschell — till at length the lazy
earth has been really made to travel round the sun
like other planets, just as the ridiculed philosopher
had advocated. Nay, in a more enlightened age,
and in a Protestant country, a Hoffman's opinion