Heavy as is the draft of the material sciences upon the thought and energy of the century, it has not monopolized them.  No trifling resources have been left for mere abstract investigation.  If meta-physics stands, despite the labors of Stewart, Hamilton, Hegel, Comte, very much where it did when Socrates ran amuck among the casuistical Quixotes of his day, and left the philosophic tilters of Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of mind, and particularly mental pathology, has made some steps forward on crutches furnished by the medical profession.  The treatment of insanity is on a more rational and efficient footing.  The statistician collects, and invites the moral philosopher to collate, the records of crime.  The naturalist studies the life of the lower animals, and gives the coup de grace to the uncompromising distinction drawn by human conceit between instinct and intelligence.

In the walks of comparative philology much has been accomplished.  Sanskrit has been exhumed.  Aryan and Semitic roots are traced back to an almost synchronous antiquity.  The decipherment of the Egyptian inscriptions seems to bring us into communication with a still more remote form of language.  More recent periods derive new light from the Etruscan tombs and the Assyrian bricks.  Linguists deem themselves in sight of something better than the “bow-wow” theory, and are no longer content to let the calf, the lamb and the child bleat in one and the same vocabulary of labials, and with no other rudiments than “ma” and “pa” “speed the soft intercourse from pole to pole.”  As yet, that part of mankind which knows not its right hand from its left is the only one possessed of a worldwide lingo.  The flux that is to weld all tongues into one, and produce a common language like a common unit of weight, measure and coinage, remains to be discovered.  A Chinese pig, transplanted to an Anglo-Saxon stye, has no difficulty in instituting immediate converse with his new friend, but the gentleman who travels in Europe needs to carry an assortment of dialects for use on opposite sides of the same rivulet or the same hill.  However, as the French franc has been adopted by four other nations, and the French litre and metre by a greater number, one and the same mail and postage made to serve Europe and America, and passports been abolished, we may venture to picture to ourselves the time when the German shall consent to clear his throat, the Frenchman his nose, the Spaniard his tonsils and the Englishman the tip of his tongue—­when all shall become as little children and be mutually comprehensible.  Commerce at present is doing more than the philosophers to that end.  While the countrymen of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Mueller persist in burying their laboriously heaped treasures under a load of black-letter type and words and sentences the most fearfully and wonderfully made, the skipper scatters English words with English calico and American clocks among all the isles.  A picturesque fringe of pigeon English decorates the coasts of Africa, Asia and Oceanica.  It might be deeper, and doubtless will be, for our mother-tongue will very certainly be supreme in the world of trade for at least a couple of centuries to come.  If we were only half as sure of its being adopted by France as by Fiji!