PREFACE. HIS Second Series of Lectures on the Science of THIS Language was delivered last year at the Royal Institution in London. Most of the topics treated in them had for many years formed the subject of my public courses at Oxford. In casting my notes into the shape of lectures to be addressed to a more advanced audience, I left out many things that were merely elementary, and I made several additions in order to show the bearing of the Science of Language on some of the more important problems of philosophy and religion. Whilst expressing my gratitude to the readers and reviewers of the first series of my Lectures, to those who differed from me even more than to those who agreed with me, I venture to hope that this second volume may meet with as many indulgent friends and intelligent critics as the first. MAX MÜLLER. OXFORD: June 11, 1864. LECTURES. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. Na course of lectures which I had the honour to deliver in this Institution two years ago, I endeavoured to show that the language which we speak, and the languages that are and that have been spoken in every part of our globe since the first dawn of human life and human thought, supply materials capable of scientific treatment. We can collect them, we can classify them, we can reduce them to their constituent elements, and deduce from them some of the laws that determine their origin, govern their growth, necessitate their decay; we can treat them, in fact, in exactly the same spirit in which the geologist treats his stones and petrifactions-nay, in some respects, in the same spirit in which the astronomer treats the stars of heaven, or the botanist the flowers of the field. There is a Science of Language, as there is a science of the earth, its flowers and its stars; and though, as a young science, it is very far as yet from that perfection which-thanks to the efforts of the intellectual giants of so many ages and many countries -has been reached in astronomy, botany, and even in B |