Yet after all, Sanscrit, it was soon seen, was not the parent, but ’the elder sister’ of the Indo-Germanic languages.  Behind Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic tongues, lurks a lost language—­the mysterious Aryan, which, reechoed through the tones of those six remaining Pleiades, its sisters, speaks of a mighty race which once, it may be, ruled supreme over a hundred lands, or perchance sole in the Caucasus.  It is strange to see philologists slowly reconstructing, here and there, fragments of the Aryan,

    ‘And speak in a tongue which man speaks no more.’

Among the many excellent elementary and introductory works on philology which have appeared of late years, this of Mueller’s is on several accounts the best.  It is clearly written, so as to be within the comprehension of any reader of ordinary intelligence, and we can hardly conceive that any such person would not find it an extremely entertaining book.  Its author is a genial writer—­he writes with a relish and with real power—­he loves knowledge, and wishes others to share it with him.  Language, he holds—­though the idea is not new with him—­springs from a very few hundred roots, which are the phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature.  Every substance has its peculiar ring when struck—­man, under the action of certain laws, must develop first onomato-poietic sounds, and finally language.  With this we take leave of this excellent work, trusting that the public will extend to it the favor which it so amply deserves.

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WASHINGTON IRVING.  By his Nephew, PIERRE M. IRVING. 
     Vol.  I. New-York:  G.P.  Putnam.  Boston:  A.K.  Loring. 1862.

This work has a strong, we might say an extraordinary claim to the interest of the most general reader, in its very first paragraph, since in it we are told that Washington Irving, on committing to his nephew Pierre the vast mass of papers requisite to his biography, remarked:  ’Somebody will be writing my life when I am gone, and I wish you to do it.  You must promise me that you will.’  So with unusual wealth of material, gathered together for the purpose by the subject of the biography himself, the work has been begun, by the person whom Irving judged best fitted for it.

And a delightful work it is, not a page without something of special relish, as might be anticipated in the chronicle of a life which is thickly studded with personal association or correspondence with almost every intellectual eminence either of Europe or America during the past half-century.  But apart from this, there is a racy Irving-y flavor from the very beginning, long before the wide world had incorporated Irving into its fraternity of great men, in the details of life, of home travel and of homely incident, as set forth in extracts from his letters, which is irresistibly charming.  Full as this portion of the life is, we can not resist the hope that it will be greatly