THE ASCENT OF MAN Author:Henry Drummond This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ...informs us that as regards the material of expression, there is " irreconcilable diversity " among them. "There are a very consid... more »erable number of groups between whose significant signs exist no more apparent correspondences than between those of English, Hungarian, and Malay; none namely which may not be merely fortuitous." To account for these dialects a suggestion, as interesting as it is ingenious, has been advanced by Dr. Hale. Imagine the case of a family of Red Indians, father, mother, and half a dozen children, in the vicissitudes of war, cut off from their tribe. Suppose the father to be scalped and the mother soon to die. The little ones left to themselves in some lonely valley, living upon roots and herbs, would converse for a time by using the few score words they had heard from their parents. But as they grew up they would require new words and would therefore coin them. As they became a tribe they would require more words, and so in time a Language might arise, all the words expressive of the simpler relations--father, mother, tent, fire--being common to other Indian Languages, but all the later words purely arbitrary and necessarily a standing puzzle to philology. The curious thing is that this theory is borne out by some most interesting geographical facts. " If, under such circumstances, disease, or the casualties of a hunter's life should carry off the parents, the survival of the children would, it is evident, depend mainly upon the nature of the climate and the ease with which food could be procured at all seasons of the year. In ancient Europe, after the present climatal conditions were established, it is doubtful if a family of children under ten years of age could have lived through a single winter. We are not, therefore,...« less