Now I ask any one who may have read my Lectures, whether it was not very natural that I should be struck with a certain similarity between my old course of lectures on the Science of Language, and the lectures delivered soon after on the Science of Language at Washington? But I was not blind to the differences, and I never wished to claim as my own what was original in the American book.
For instance, when the American Professor says that one of the most important problems is to find out “How we learn English,” I said at once, “That’s his ane;” and when after leading us from mother to grandmother, and great-grandmother, he ends with Adam, and says:—
“It is only the first man before whom every beast of the field and every fowl of the air must present itself, to see what he will call it; and whatever he calls any living creature, that is the name thereof, not to himself alone, but to his family and descendants, who are content to style each as their father had done before them.”
I said again, “That’s his ane.”
When afterwards we read about the large and small number of words used by different ranks and classes, and by different writers, when we come to the changes in English, the phonetic changes, to phonetics in general, to changes of meaning, etc., few, I think, will fail to perceive what I naturally perceived most strongly, “the leaves of memory rustling in the dark.” I perceived even such accidental reminiscences as:—
Old Prussian leaving behind a brief catechism (p. 215), and,
Old Prussian leaving behind an old catechism (p. 200);
Frisian having a literature of its own (p. 211), and the
Frisians having a literature of their own (p. 178),
though, of course, no other reader could possibly perceive such unimportant coincidences. These, no doubt, were mere accidents; but when we consider that there is perhaps no science which admits of more varied illustration than the Science of Language, then to find page after page the same instances which one had collected one’s self, certainly left the impression that the soil from which these American lectures sprang, was chiefly alluvial. Of course, as Professor Whitney has acknowledged his indebtedness to me for these illustrations, I have no complaint to make, I only protest against his ingratitude in representing such illustrations as mere by-work. For the purpose of teaching and placing a difficult subject into its proper light, illustrations, I think, are hardly less important than arguments. In order to show, for instance, in what sense Chinese may be called a parler enfantin, I had said:—