Philology and Darwinism

Abstract

THE relations of the science of language to the Darwinian hypothesis have been touched upon by one of the most acute and learned of modern scholars Prof. August Schleicher, of Jena, whose lamented death a year ago,* at the early age of forty-eight, is a severe loss to European science, was an ardent supporter of the doctrine of variability of species. Besides being a most eminent linguist, he had long been interested in practical botany; and as a cultivator of ferns he had enjoyed many opportunities of observing the apparent transformation of natural subdivisions. It was not, however, as a botanist that Mr. Darwin's book was mainly interesting to him, but far more from the light which his theories seemed to throw on the phenomena of language. The first edition of the “Origin of Species “appeared in November 1859, and Prof. Schleicher, three years before he had met with Brown's German translation of it, had in his book, “Die Deutsche Sprache “(pp. 43, 44), called attention to the struggle for existence among words, the disappearance of primitive forms, and the immense development and differentiation which may be produced by ordinary causes in a single family of speech. On receiving Mr. Darwin's book from his friend Prof. Häckel, he wrote him a letter, which has since been published, on “Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft;” and in answer to the objection that he had, in this letter, assumed that languages were material existences, having a real natural life, he wrote a second pamphlet on the ” Importance of Language for the Natural History of Mankind.”