Attempt > Volume 3

THE ATTEMPT. 45
saurians slept by slow river brinks, beneath the fringing shadows of mighty forests
of fronde-crowned trees, never now known to man. And through these fossil tokens
of that luxuriant vegetable life exists—not fossilised, not embalmed; perhaps asleep,
but awaiting its resurrection—so much sunshine ! Just so much light and heat as
our life-giving sun poured forth to vivify and to expand the rich gi-een ferns, so
much light and heat leaps back to us in flame from the fossil ferns blackened into
coal. Thus in language we find more than fossils; there is spirit, a stored up life, ready
to be expended on the service, and for the pleasure, of those who know how to
awake it. Too few spend time enough in making themselves acquainted with a
theme so rich ; and, till they are acquainted with it, how can they realise the vast
store-house of knowledge that lies in the mere structure of language, which is not
built of the dry dead forms that many fancy? How the whole course of the world
would have differed from its present ways if all its inhabitants had been left to
speak the one universal language, first spoken in the garden of Eden, or in the Ark,
is a consideration most wide-spreading and all-overturning in its novelty, but not
one which we have either time or purpose to enter on at present. But that this
confounding of tongues was not so complete as has been suj^posed, and that it arises
from simple causes, most natural, reasonable and right, we must believe : for the
great increase of any family leads to the breaking-up, disj^ersion and diversity of the
members, and of all their accompanying circumstances. At the same time, there are
some leading features, some family likeness and habit, that endure in words, as they
do in men, through the gi-eatest seeming dissimilarity to a casual glance.
We feel, also, that no random agglomeration of syllables thrown together, to ex¬
press the ideas of many minds, could have formed any known language and grammar,
and it seems as if necessary that one great mind had formed the plan, and created
the power of speech that might serve a nation. Was it not one of the " good gifts "
that God gave Adam, when He walked and conversed with him as with a friend in
the garden of Eden. But broken-up families, in their necessary dispersion, bore
with them their memory full of the common language, alike at first—until the lapse
of time permitted peculiarities of accent, or errors of speech, to become customs—slips
of traditional recollections to be repaired—novelties to be introduced by need—while
change-producing change wrought such metamorphoses, that one must needs dig deep
and wisely before the original forms be found. We cannot fancy that we have im¬
proved upon language, any more than we can believe the original man was less
perfect than the present man. Certainly, man has now more faults and failings,
more exceptions to rules, more slurring thereof; and so has his speech ; while, at the