otherwise, for any gross instance of overwork which might occur under his roof, the practice would certainly be checked. Any difficulty of obtaining evidence might be counteracted by the encouragement of informers, for the hours of work being necessarily open to the observation of neighbours, proof of the continuance of abuses would be readily obtainable and opinion would then speedily lead to their abandonment. The local authorities, and especially the Medical Officers of the Provincial Boards of Health, might be intrusted with a power of inspecting the smaller establishments and domestic workshops; and the continuance of the abuse would be improbable after the legislature shall have condemned it. If in the larger establishments the legal hours of work for children and young persons and females were specified and their infringement made a punishable offence, there can be but little doubt that the majority of employers would cheerfully conform to the provisions of the law. Experience has hitherto fully justified the wisdom of legislation. The Factory Act has contributed in a striking degree to the good feeling between masters and workmen, the latter of whom now speak of it as their true charter.' * 'The condition of the persons employed in the additional works which have recently come under inspection,' says the gentleman whose able Report we have previously had the pleasure of quoting, 'shows the absolute necessity for supervision, and has strengthened the opinion formed five-and-thirty years ago, that free labour (if so it may be termed), even in a free country, requires the strong arm of the law to protect it from the cupidity and ignorance of parents. Most of the workshops of this great commercial country have fallen into the inevitable track of competitive industry when unrestricted by law, namely, to cheapen prices by the employment of women and children in the first instance, and then to increase production by protracted hours of work, without regard to age, sex, or physical capability, or to the need of social requirements. Thus we have thousands of the working classes in a state of semi-barbarity; parents who appear to have little or no natural affection, fathers who are wholly sensual, mothers who are without domestic knowledge, children utterly ignorant, and without obedience, and masters who are not, perhaps, regardless, but who have never duly considered the consequences of congregations formed of such materials.' † * Report IV., p. xviii. Report of Mr. Baker, Inspector of Factories, for 1865. Vol. 119.-No. 238. 2 D ART. T ART. IV.-1. Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. By Max Müller, M.A. Fourth Edition. London, 1864. 2. Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February, March, April, and May, 1863. By Max Müller, M.A. Second Series. London, 1864. 3. A Dictionary of English Etymology. By Hensleigh Wedgwood, M.A. (Vols. I and II., Vol. III. Part 1.) London, 1859-65. 4. Chapters on Language. By the Rev. Frederic W. Farrar, M.A. London, 1865. WHEN WHEN we survey the modern science of Comparative Philology, and the position of our English scholars in it, it is by no means pleasant to find ourselves here much worse placed than in many other fields of art and science. Towards the end of the last century we had actually grasped the clue which was to lead to the great philological discoveries of the present; but it was for the most part by Continental explorers, especially by Germans, that this clue was followed up. For years we not only did not teach, we were backward even in learning but of late we have happily begun to move again, and at last seem to have started with a fair hope of making the last days of the nineteenth century redeem the deficiencies of the first. English students have been working in particular departments of the science with much energy and some success, and moreover we have now that great power in producing and encouraging science, an educated public strongly interested in the study of Language, and to a large extent both able and willing to hear all sides of an argument, trusting to broad common sense in shaping their opinions according to the evidence laid before them. In having a public of this kind, we are probably more fortunate than any other country in Europe, and, having it, we are bound to make the most of it. It is much better that such interest should flow gradually through society, raising the whole intellectual level of the country, and thus reacting beneficially upon the progress of science, than that, as in Germany, the learned class should be, like the noble class, so unhappily wanting in intermediate members to connect it with the main body of the people. The public interest in Philological discovery had for some years been gradually widening and deepening in England, when the the efforts of a German scholar gave its growth a new and energetic impulse. If we examine the effect produced by Professor Max Müller's teaching at Oxford, and his Lectures at the Royal Institution in London, we shall see that, great as it is, it is due to a perfectly intelligible combination of causes. To take a place among the highest rank of teachers a man must be an original discoverer. The mere schoolmaster, though crammed with the learning of twenty Universities, can only portray to his scholars, as it were, the shadow of science which has been projected on the surface of his passive mind; but to him scientific facts want the perspective and the solidity which they have to the sight and grasp of the real craftsman who does new work among them. On the other hand, it does not follow that every learned and original student must be able to teach. There stand before us the works of a great German Philologist, who has flung the results of his life-long labour into a row of volumes where thousands of pages, full of shrewdest reasoning and overwhelming array of facts, are hustled together with hardly the skeleton of an index or a plan, argument nested within argument, and digression within digression, like the stories within stories in a book of Hindoo tales. From time to time some special student girds up his loins, plunges in at what seems the likeliest opening in this trackless forest, and comes out laden with knowledge wherewith to build up his own scientific reputation. We need not say of whose volumes we speak readers of this class know well enough, and few others care. It is true such labours as these are not lost-sooner or later their effects come out into the general field of knowledge; but the teacher who will act at once upon a great public must give them not only knowledge, but knowledge in the state that their time and training will enable them to receive. Perfectly understanding how to do this, Max Müller was able to bring forward the results of others' work and his own in a way which was not made unscientific by being popular. His argument has been somewhat of this kind: Here are certain facts: you must take my word not only that they are sound, but that the rest of the same kind-though I cannot heap them up here before you-tend in the same direction; and now upon these facts I base such and such inferences. If any one will show either fact or inference to be wrong, at any rate I have done my best in helping him to bring out truth.' Such a method was eminently suited to the English temper. We may be insular and prejudiced in our opinions; but we are, after all, the countrymen of Bacon, and our minds lie open to straightforward inference from definite fact rather than to dogmatic or tran 2 D 2 scendental scendental teaching. When we see how Max Müller united just the qualities required for the work he undertook, we need not fancy that any undue partiality has given him a popularity not fairly earned, much less grudge him, as a foreigner, his immense success on English ground. In reviewing here his two series of Lectures, it is not our purpose either to give a descriptive catalogue of their contents or to popularise that which is already popular, but rather to show through what stages the school he belongs to has grown up into its present state, to discuss some of his main tenets, and to compare them with the views held by other thinkers, dead or living, abroad or at home. Those who take as their standing-ground the position of this dominant modern school may look back upon two great phases through which the science of Language has passed. At first, words somewhat alike in sound were ranged together when they were also somewhat alike in meaning, and often enough when they were not. Words compounded of root and inflexion or suffix were treated together in the lump as they occur in actual speech; if the language a word belonged to did not give a satisfactory meaning, the etymologist went to some other, and it was hard indeed if Dutch or Latin, Hebrew or Basque, could not help him to something more or less like the sound he wanted, bearing a more or less appropriate meaning. For the human organs of voice are very much the same everywhere, and it so happens that the sets of articulations used in the many hundred languages of the world do, in some rough way, correspond. It is only in a rough way, for different languages vary materially in their rendering of the sounds which our rude alphabetic systems make shift to write with the same letters. It has even been found that whole groups of articulate sounds present in some languages are absent in others; thus certain North American tribes not only themselves pronounced no labials, such as p, b, m, but expressed their disgust at the absurdity of any one being expected to shut his mouth to speak instead of opening it. In like manner, some native tribes of Brazil used neither f, l, nor r in their language; whereupon, as the historians tell us, their Portuguese conquerors facetiously described them as a race with neither Fé, Ley, nor Rey-that is to say, with neither Faith, Law, nor King. But the fact of our alphabet serving even badly to write all manner of languages shows how much likeness there is in the articulations used over the world; and thus to the old-fashioned etymologist who overlooked all but the most glaring divergences of sound, as well as all questions of the traceable history and grammatical structure of words, it became easy easy to imagine any similarly sounding terms to have a real connexion. To his mind it was simple and unobjectionable that a violet should be so called because vi olet it smells strong. The superstitious practice of the South Sea islands, which makes certain persons and things tabu, or sacred from polluting touch, is so familiar in England that we have even taken up the word for our own use. The way in which a comparatively modern writer explains the origin of this word is quite instructive, as typical of the sort of case where this early philological method is at its worst. The Malay dictionary borrows from the Arabic the word tabut, 'the Jewish ark of the covenant;' now, as this was a very sacred and inviolable object, therefore, our author reasons, the Polynesian word tabu, meaning sacred, inviolable,' is derived from it. We are not by any means to think that, because this rude method of comparison has been generally replaced by something better, it is even now extinct; for straggling remains of old methods continue for ages to exist by the side of the prevailing new ones. What Mr. M'Lennan, in his remarkable book on Primitive Marriage, says of remains of early customs, is true also of the stages through which knowledge is developed in the world: 'In the sciences of law and society, old means not old in chronology but in structure; that is most archaic which lies nearest to the beginning of human progress considered as a development, and that is most modern which is farthest removed from that beginning.' From time to time books are still published to show that plain Saxon or Scandinavian names of country places in England are relics of Hebrew or Phoenician colonisation, or that Gesenius is the fountain-head whence we are to trace down Liddell and Scott. Such books even keep up in the midst of us the worse side, not the better, of the early philologists; for the guidance of history and the common-sense plan of finding, if possible, the etymologies of their words in languages actually or in past time spoken in the country-such as Norman, Saxon, or Celtic in England-led them, to a great extent, right. There were, too, among them men whose views were far in advance of their age. Roger Bacon, that marvel of the thirteenth century, is far ahead of some living writers in the nineteenth; he protests against those who propose derivations of words in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew without a due regard to the history of those languages. Brito,' he says, 'dares to derive Gehenna from the Greek ge, earth, and ennos, deep; though Gehenna is a Hebrew word, and cannot have its origin in Greek.' Friar Bacon saw clearly the way in which very different words fall in the course of time into one indistinguishable form, as when kevós, empty, |