Often where history is utterly dumb concerning the past, language speaks. The discovery of the foot-print on the sand did not more certainly prove to Robinson Crusoe that the island of which he had fancied himself the sole inhabitant contained a brother man, than the similarity of the inflections in the speech of different peoples proves their brotherhood. Were all the histories of England swept from existence, the study of its language,--developing the fact that the basis of the language is Saxon, that the names of the prominent objects of nature are Celtic, the terms of war and government Norman-French, the ecclesiastical terms Latin,--would enable us to reconstruct a large part of the story of the past, as it even now enables us to verify many of the statements of the chroniclers. Humboldt, in his “Cosmos,” eulogizes the study of words as one of the richest sources of historical knowledge; and it is probable that what comparative philology, yet in its infancy, has already discovered, will compel a rewriting of the history of the world. Even now it has thrown light on many of the most perplexing problems of religion, history, and ethnography; and it seems destined to triumphs of which we can but dimly apprehend the consequences. On the stone tablets of the universe God’s own finger has written the changes which millions of years have wrought on the mountain and the plain; and in the fluid air, which he coins into spoken words, man has preserved forever the grand facts of his past history and the grand processes of his inmost soul. “Nations and _languages_ against dynasties and treaties,” is the cry which is remodelling the map of Europe; and in our country, comparative philologists,--to their shame be it said,--have labored with Satanic zeal to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the theory of slavery. It has been said that the interpretation of one word in the Vedas fifty years earlier would have saved many Hindoo widows from being burned alive; and now that the philologists of Germany and England have shown that the iron network of _caste_, which for centuries has hindered the development of India, is not a religious institution, and has no authority in their sacred writings, but is the invention of an arrogant and usurping priesthood,--or, at best, an erroneous tradition, due to the half-knowledge or to the imposture of the native pundits,--the British government will be able to inflict penalties for the observance of the rules of _caste_, and thus to relieve India from the greatest clog on its progress.