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Language, in which his object appears to have been to prove that it is of divine origin. This is a view of the subject not peculiar indeed to him, but still not usually adopted by philosophers and philologists; though I confess it has long appeared to me the only tenable hypothesis. The employment of hieroglyphics and the use of them to record facts of a certain kind, are easily accounted for; but the discovery of alphabetic writing is a very different matter. The extraordinary simplicity of alphabetic characters, and their still more extraordinary power, render it improbable that they should be the discovery of chance or the invention of a barbarous people: while the impossibilty of arriving at any great degree of civilization or scientific advancement without them, supposes that the discovery must have preceded. If reason and language are the gifts of God, it is not going too far to say that both are imperfect and very limited in their operation without the use of a written language. In order to preserve and authenticate a Divine revelation, a fixed medium of that revelation seems absolutely necessary; and perhaps it would not be difficult to suggest reasons amountto a high probability, that when the law was given to Moses, the first knowledge of alphabetic writing and the first specimen of it were then communicated. But this is not the place to pursue such an inquiry.

ON

WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

The acknowledged priority of spoken to written language, appears to us a very decisive argument for the divine origin of the latter.

Among those who hold that language is a mere human invention, there have been two opinions ; some maintaining that substantives or the names of external objects, would be the words first invented; and others holding that verbs or words expressive of the mutual relations of objects, must have existed anterior to these, as an individual would not think of naming an object until he had been in some way or other affected by its properties. On either of these hypotheses it seems to us very obvious that it would occur much more readily to the mind of a savage to represent his ideas by forms than by sounds. If he wished to particularize any object that was near, he would point to it; and if he wished to express the relation between any two objects, he would, in all probability, point first to the one and then to the other; or if the objects were moveable, he might express the same idea by bringing them into actual contact.

Were these objects removed from his view, so that he could no longer express his idea by pointing to them, the most natural resource that could

occur to him would be, to produce, if possible, a resemblance to the objects, and now to point to these as he had formerly done to the objects themselves.

As there are comparatively few objects that utter sound, and as the sounds cannot be distinctly imitated by the human voice; and as, on the other hand, all external objects have a form which can in general be easily represented; it would probably occur to him that to delineate the absent objects would be the best method of representing them. If he wished to express some relation existing between two objects, he would express the idea as before, by representing the symbols of two objects in a state of contact.

Thus, had man been the inventor of language, we would have expected that at first men would have expressed their ideas by written symbols, accompanied by gestures, and now and then perhaps by the utterance of such articulate sounds as evidently resembled the idea they intended to express. But quite the reverse of this is admitted by those who maintain that language is of human origin; and while they do not deny that a slight degree of civilization is necessary before men begin to express their ideas by symbols which bear some resemblance to the objects they are intended to represent, these philologists are guilty of very gross inconsistency in attributing to the most barbarous savages, a discovery of a much higher order; even the discovery of spoken language, where ideas are represented by sounds almost entirely artitrary.

On this subject, as on most others, men of different parties seem to have run into opposite extremes. Some of the advocates of revelation, thinking they perceived it clearly declared there that language is of divine origin, jealous of the least infringement on the authority of the sacred volume, have attempted to prove the unqualified proposition, that language is the gift of God. A hold has thus been given to their opponents, as it is evident from the very nature of the expressions, that many if not most of the words in every language have been invented by man. The mere philologist again, in attempting to philosophize on language as a mere human invention, has landed himself in the absurdity of attributing the sublime discovery of the powers of speech to an age confessedly too barbarous to make the much more simple discovery of symbolic language. Revelation and sound philosophy in this case, as in all others, are at one. Language was originally the gift of God, and no doubt, for a considerable time, the same language. It may have been a language of the simplest kind, and in all probability was so. And yet, although there had been no multiplying of the languages of the earth; and the passage of Scripture in reference to this, bears another signification which has been sometimes assigned to it, that "God confounded their works;" still we say, from this one original tongue there may easily have emerged all the languages on the face of our earth. When we consider the great changes that have taken place in modern languages in a

comparatively short time, how easy would it be for a language to be entirely changed when there was almost no communication between different countries.

On the supposition that language is of human origin, we should be inclined to favour the former of these hypotheses, although we confess, from the very able treatise on this subject which was delivered a few weeks ago from our humanity chair, we had almost been led to give the preference to the latter. Place a number of children in a room by themselves, say the advocates of the first hypothesis, and the first thing they would set about would be to give names to the objects around them. This, however, say those who hold by the other supposition, supposes that the children have been previously acquainted with language. Were it otherwise, no child would give a name to an object till it had, in some way or other, affected his own person, and then he would name the object from its felt effects. Thus, it is said he would call fire the burner, water the cooler, &c.

There is a difficulty, however, connected with this hypothesis, notwithstanding its plausibility, which would lead us, were we at all inclined to think language a human invention, to give the preference to the other. Before the child could make his companions understand what was meant by the name burner, he must have first communicated to them the meaning of the verb to burn.