We do not object to that milder form of philology of which the works of Dean Trench offer the readiest and most pleasing example, and which confines itself to the mere study of words, to the changes of form and meaning they have undergone and the forgotten moral that lurks in them.  But the interest of Dr. Trench and others like him sticks fast in words, it is almost wholly an aesthetic interest, and does not pretend to concern itself with the deeper problems of language, its origin, its comparative anatomy, its bearing upon the prehistoric condition of mankind and the relations of races, and its claim to a place among the natural sciences as an essential element in any attempt to reconstruct the broken and scattered annals of our planet.  It would not be just to find fault with Dr. Trench’s books for lacking a scientific treatment to which they make no pretension, but they may fairly be charged with smelling a little too much of the shop.  There is a faint odor of the sermon-case about every page, and we learn to dread, sometimes to skip, the inevitable homily, as we do the moral at the end of an AEsopic fable.  We enter our protest, not against Dr. Trench in particular, for his books have other and higher claims to our regard, but because we find that his example is catching, the more so as verbal morality is much cheaper than linguistic science.  If there be anything which the study of words should teach, it is their value.

There are two theories as to the origin of language, which, for shortness, may be defined as the poetic and the matter-of-fact.  The former (of which M. Ernest Renan is one of the most eloquent advocates) supposes a primitive race or races endowed with faculties of cognition and expression so perfect and so intimately responsive one to the other, that the name of a thing came into being coincidently with the perception of it.  Verbal inflections and other grammatical forms came into use gradually to meet the necessities of social commerce between man and man, and were at some later epoch reduced to logical system by constructive minds.  If we understand him rightly, while not excluding the influence of onomatopeia, (or physical imitation,) he would attach a far greater importance to metaphysical causes.  He says admirably well, “La liaison du sens et du mot n’est jamais necessaire, jamais arbitraire; toujours elle est motivee.”  His theory amounts to this:  that the fresh perfection of the senses and the mental faculties made the primitive man a poet.

The other theory seeks the origin of language in certain imitative radicals out of which it has analogically and metaphorically developed itself.  This system has at least the merits of clearness and simplicity, and of being to a certain extent capable of demonstration.  Its limitation in this last respect will depend upon that mental constitution which divides men naturally into Platonists and Aristotelians.  It has never before received so thorough an exposition or been tested by so wide a range of application as in Mr. Wedgwood’s volume, nor could it well be more fortunate in its advocate.  Mr. Wedgwood is thorough, scrupulous, and fair-minded.