Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[185] not derived directly from any other. In time, should other wanderers join them, the language will be accepted by these also. The children.of the little colony will grow up hearing no other. In time philologists will get hold of it-by which time it will have worked out a grammar and inflections of its own-and they will vainly speculate whence it came. There is noticing intrinsically impossible in such a situation; and if it be said that it would be one of extreme rarity, it must be remembered that the world is very large, and that two hundred such instances would account for all the entirely distinct stocks upon the face of the earth.

Mr. Hale points out, in confirmation of this theory, that much the larger part of these separate linguistic stocks may be traced to the warm regions of the globe, where such scattered households of very young children could best be kept alive. Many of them occur among the American aborigines, with whom it is a thing of frequent occurrence for a single family to wander off from the main tribe into banishment, or be exiled for some offence against the tribal law. Then there are the wide island populations of the world, where the isolation is more complete than that of sierras and prairies. But, after all, the important facts may he close at hand. Mr. tale suggests a field for scientific observation in every nursery. Nothing has as yet been less reduced