Disappointed in its hope of presiding over the reconstruction of the distant past of man, the study of language has in recent years tended somewhat to renounce the historical—­that is to say, anthropological—­method altogether.  The alternative is a purely formal treatment of the subject.  Thus, whereas vocabularies seem hopelessly divergent in their special contents, the general apparatus of vocal expression is broadly the same everywhere.  That all men alike communicate by talking, other symbols and codes into which thoughts can be translated, such as gestures, the various kinds of writing, drum-taps, smoke signals, and so on, being in the main but secondary and derivative, is a fact of which the very universality may easily blind us to its profound significance.  Meanwhile, the science of phonetics—­having lost that “guid conceit of itself” which once led it to discuss at large whether the art of talking evolved at a single geographical centre, or at many centres owing to similar capacities of body and mind—­contents itself now-a-days for the most part with conducting an analytic survey of the modes of vocal expression as correlated with the observed tendencies of the human speech-organs.  And what is true of phonetics in particular is hardly less true of comparative philology as a whole.  Its present procedure is in the main analytic or formal.  Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply by contrasting the different ways in which words are affected by being put together into a sentence.  No attempt is made to show that one type of arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is in any way more rudimentary—­that is to say, less adapted to the needs of human intercourse.  It is not even pretended that a given language is bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; though the process known as analogy—­that is, the regularizing of exceptions by treating the unlike as if it were like—­will always be apt to establish one system at the expense of the rest.

If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminence amongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction must be given to its inquiries.  And there is much to be said for any change that would bring about this result.  Without constant help from the philologist, anthropology is bound to languish.  To thoroughly understand the speech of the people under investigation is the field-worker’s master-key; so much so, that the critic’s first question in determining the value of an ethnographical work must always be, Could the author talk freely with the natives in their own tongue?  But how is the study of particular languages to be pursued successfully, if it lack the stimulus and inspiration which only the search for general principles can impart to any branch of science?  To relieve the hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must be present a sense of wider issues involved, and such