it was the light in which he rejoiced. With it he had overcome the uncomfortable dread of the night, during which he was liable to all kinds of danger, and was helplessly abandoned to the attacks of the beasts of the forest issuing forth in quest of prey. We who illumine the night by flaming torches and radiant chandeliers, or electric light as bright as the sun, we can scarcely realise those horrors which man felt in the reign of darkness, which was unbroken as yet by any art, and populated his imagination with ghastly shapes. We can barely sympathise with that anxiety which still speaks so vividly in the prayers of the Veda poets, or with the terrors that for a long time seized the intimidated hearts of men on the occasion of solar eclipses, when they feared the sun's light might disappear for ever even in the day, and an everlasting night break in upon them. And yet how comparatively modern is the wax-candle, nay, the oil lamp! In Homer it is still shavings and a bundle of brushwood which illumined the spacious halls.

Wherever we cast our eye, a chain of development is shown in the history of every object, the possession of which at present seems to us quite a matter of course, and at a misty distance there looms a period when such development had not yet begun. It is true it is only an outward possession which we see disappear with fire, with artificial light, from the series of our earthly blessings, but still we are ever again reminded thereby of our remotest past, of the singularly wonderful fortune that has led our species up to be at the

head of the animal world, and of this earth in general. A few steps backward and we should see a second blessing disappear from this precious inheritance of humanity, and then a third; religion too, and finally language. A retrospective glance at those remote times, such as our age affords above all its predecessors, liberates our soul by making it partake of a past infinity. When Goethe, absorbed in osteological studies, confessed to have meditated amidst world-stirring events his discovery of the physical affinity of man to brutes, Börne's anger was roused, his ardent spirit yearning impatiently for deeds. And when the July revolution broke out, and the faithful Eckermann, finding Goethe greatly excited on the subject of the great event that had happened at Paris, was about to begin to speak of the faults of the overthrown ministers, Goethe replied, "We do not seem to comprehend each other. I do not speak at all of those people; my mind is occupied with quite different things. I am speaking of the dispute that has openly broken out in the Academy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, of such paramount importance to science. Henceforth mind will rule in France too in the investigation of nature, and prevail over matter. Glimpses will be caught of great maxims of creation, of God's mysterious workshop. Now," continued Goethe, "Geoffroy de St. Hilaire too is decidedly on our side, and with him all his more distinguished disciples and adherents in France. This event is of incredible value to me, and I justly exult over the finally arrived universal triumph of a cause to which I

have devoted my life, and which is pre-eminently my own." The idea the victory of which Goethe at that time saw with his mind's eye, and which Geoffroy de St. Hilaire declared to be his own-the idea of the evolution of the world-will, I doubt not, emancipate the world as much as any of the greatest historical achievements did. Nor do I fear being misconstrued when I own to you, my honoured fellow-towns-men and women, that the thought has often floated through my mind that the soil of this city of ours possesses some claim to this liberating idea of evolution; that in this town, which owes so much to natural development, the voice of admonition sounds doubly loud to continue to meditate the idea of the development of humanity, aye! perhaps to think it out to an end. This idea will one day teach us what man has to expect and to claim for himself from humanity and from nature. And as it opens to us a vista into the future, so with it begins to open a retrospective view of the past, just as happened with space from the moment when the sky ceased to arch over us as a stony cover, and we began to cast glances into, and indulge in speculations on, the unbounded universe. [History is no longer a limited horizon; the same things are not in wearisome uniformity repeated from century to century, but in unfathomed depths one form of existence succeeds another. Nature reveals to us her wonders in an infinite series, and the soul of man is elevated, becoming a heavenly genius which soars with mighty wing through eternity.

VI.

On the Primitive Home of the Indo-Europeans.

THE discovery of the primitive stock of the IndoEuropeans, which has been made within the past sixty years, is a fact of incredible importance, and of incalculable influence on the conception of man's earliest past. The almost marvellous results which our century has obtained in the decipherment of the hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions led to a direct knowledge, gained from the monuments themselves, of the life of peoples which one could not till then have hoped ever to see resuscitated from its millennial sleep. Historical details have been authenticated, dating from times which fancy had ever regarded as its indisputable domain and had populated with grotesque shapes. But the people of the pyramids and hieroglyphics is, notwithstanding, an historical, well-known, palpable people. It is certainly astounding that we should have learned to find some centuries before Moses-that earliest historian, as the last century was fond of calling him—the names of Palestinian cities-e.g., of the still existing Zephath-on Egyptian monuments. We are strangely moved and feel a thrill of awe running through us, as

on entering a mysterious sanctuary, when we see before our eyes the veil lifted from the deeply-hidden and dark past. But such more especially are our emotions when we approach the primitive stock from which the head and flower of the whole human race was destined to proceed-the stock from which has sprung the present civilised Europe with its mighty colonies, and not less so a large portion of the population of Asia, as far as the boundaries of China. We have here, in this people in its primitive condition, a germ before us with an abundance of developments latent within it, as it were; and though history does not contain any record of this people, and it has not left any monuments itself, so that we are able only to infer its existence, yet we can by no means doubt its having existed. How did a people in such a primitive condition live? How did it think? how speak? These questions alone have a deep interest; but to them must be added that all the civilisation of Europe, and, more or less, the condition of mankind at the present time, have been connected with the fortunes of that primitive people and swayed by its intellectual capacities, thus pointing back to the origin of that people for their own.

On its being first remarked that in the languages of Hindostan and Persia words and forms of words occur bearing a striking resemblance to Latin, Greek, and German words, many endeavoured to account for this singular phenomenon by a mutual intercourse, which they supposed to have carried foreign words