[17] See Notes to Pope’s Dunciad, Book II, verse 140.

[18] A modern namesake of the Doctor’s, the Rev. David Blair, has the following conception of the utility of these speculations:  “To enable children to comprehend the abstract idea that all the words in a language consist but of nine kinds, it will be found useful to explain how savage tribes WHO having no language, would first invent one, beginning with interjections and nouns, and proceeding from one part of speech to another, as their introduction might successively be called for by necessity or luxury.”—­Blair’s Pract.  Gram., Pref., p. vii.

[19] “Interjections, I shewed, or passionate exclamations, were the first elements of speech.  Men laboured to communicate their feelings to one another, by those expressive cries and gestures which nature taught them.”—­Dr. Hugh Blair’s Lectures, p. 57.

[20] “It is certain that the verb was invented before the noun, in all the languages of which a tolerable account has been procured, either in ancient or modern times.”—­Dr. Alex.  Murray’s History of European Languages, Vol.  I, p. 326.

[21] The Greek of this passage, together with a translation not very different from the foregoing, is given as a marginal note, in Harris’s Hermes, Book III, Chap. 3d.

[22] The Bible does not say positively that there was no diversity of languages before the flood; but, since the life-time of Adam extended fifty-six years into that of Lamech, the father of Noah, and two hundred and forty-three into that of Methuselah, the father of Lamech, with both of whom Noah was contemporary nearly six hundred years, it is scarcely possible that there should have occurred any such diversity, either in Noah’s day or before, except from some extraordinary cause.  Lord Bacon regarded the multiplication of languages at Babel as a general evil, which had had no parallel but in the curse pronounced after Adam’s transgression.  When “the language of all the earth” was “confounded,” Noah was yet alive, and he is computed to have lived 162 years afterwards; but whether in his day, or at how early a period, “grammar” was thought of, as a remedy for this evil, does not appear.  Bacon says, “Concerning speech and words, the consideration of them hath produced the science of grammar.  For man still striveth to redintegrate himself in those benedictions, of which, by his fault, he hath been deprived; and as he hath striven against the first general curse by the invention of all other arts, so hath he striven to come forth from the second general curse, which was the confusion of tongues, by the art of grammar; whereof the use in a mother tongue is small, in a foreign tongue more, but most in such foreign tongues as have ceased to be vulgar tongues, and are turned only to learned tongues.”—­See English Journal of Education, Vol. viii, p. 444.