tetes. Ulysses, who had advised his exile, with Pyrrhus (according to some, Diomedes) undertook the embassy; the latter, by promising to heal his wound, prevailed upon him to return to Troy. He was cured by Machaon (or Æsculapius), and after many Trojans, among whom was Paris, had fallen by his arrows, the city was taken. The history of Philoctetes forms the subject of one of the tragedies of Sophocles.

PHILOLOGY.* This word, among the ancients, had a signification which included what we now call philosophy, literature, the sciences, and the theory of arts, though it excluded their practice. Thus poetry and rhetoric, considered as sciences, came within the description of philology; but philologists were not expected to be orators or poets. Cicero calls his philosophical works pidodoywrepa, as opposed to his orations; the former being written in a didactic or argumentative, the latter in a more elegant or artificial style. (Ad Att., xiii, 12.) We are informed by Suetonius (De illustr. Gram., c. 10) that Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first among the Greeks who assumed the name of hoyos. He was a man of unbounded erudition, a physician, philosopher, geographer, grammarian, historian and poet, though we are told that he excelled in none of these branches. (Moreri.) Before his time, a philologer or philologist for both words are used in the English language was called yoapparikds, which did not mean a grammarian in the present acceptation of the word, but a man of letters; in which sense literary men were first called at Rome literati, and afterwards, when Greek terminology became fashionable, grammatici and philologi. Philology, then, included in ancient times, with few exceptions, every thing that could be learned (omne scibile). In those days, however, science was circumscribed within much narrower bounds than it is at present. The numerous branches which compose what is now called natural science, were very imperfectly known. The same may be said of geography, astronomy and natural philosophy. All that was known of those sciences, with grammar, rhetoric, scholastic logic, metaphysics and elementary mathematics, formed an aggregate which obtained the name of philology, until long after the destruction of

*This article comes from the same learned source with that on Language, and forms a whole with it. The interest of the subject, and the orig

inality of the author's views, are the reason of the space allowed it.-ED

the Roman empire; and that is the sense in which this word is understood in many, if not most of the colleges and universities of Europe, always with reference to ancient, and not to modern learning; hence criticism, as applied to the Greek and Roman writers, and the knowledge of ancient coins and medals, and other recondite antiquities, are considered as important branches of philology, and those which chiefly entitle their followers to the name of philologists. This opinion was general as late as the seventeenth century. At that time the Bentleys, the Scaligers, the Saumaises, were the philologists par excellence. The dictionary of the French academy defines philology érudition qui embrasse diverses parties des belles-lettres, et principalement la critique. A century afterwards Johnson defined it criticism, grammatical learning. But of late, the word philology has received a more definite and more appropriate meaning; and it seems now, by a tacit, but almost universal consent, to be chiefly, if not exclusively, appropriated to that science which embraces human language in its widest extent, analyzes and compares its component parts and its various structures in thousands of idioms and dialects, that are and have been spoken on the face of the habitable globe, and from the whole seeks to draw inferences that may lead to a clearer and more extensive knowledge than we have hitherto possessed of the history of our species, and particularly of the migrations of different nations, their connexion and intercourse with each other; for language, though perishable, like all other earthly things, is still the most lasting monument of events long since past, and the surest means of transmitting facts through successive generations. When the sounds of a language have ceased to reverberate, and no longer convey ideas through the human ear, that language still lives in written characters, which speak to the mind through the eyes, and even when the sense or meaning of those characters is lost or forgotten, genius, aided by philology, will, after many ages, revive, at least some fragments, and Champollions will arise, whose labors will perhaps succeed in recovering an ancient language, long considered as not only dead, but profoundly buried in the night of time. A science like this, so wide in its extent, and yet so homogeneous in all its parts, requires an appropriate name, a name familiar to men of science, and such as the learned world will easily be led to adopt. Various denominations have been attempt

and may at this day be as often easily disproved. The variety of forms existing in languages was not even suspected. The missionaries had not yet made known the extraordinary structure of the Chinese on the one hand, and of the American idioms on the other; what little was known of them might produce a momentary wonder, but did not excite the curiosity of grammarians and philologists. It was not until about the middle of the eighteenth century that a broad and comprehensive view of the various languages of men began to be taken by the learned. M. Maupertuis, who did not deserve all the ridicule which the jealousy of Voltaire endeavored to throw upon him, published an essay on the Origin of Language, in which he recommended studying the idioms even of savage and barbarous nations, “because,” said he, "there may be found among them some that are formed on new plans of ideas." So little was the world prepared for this view of the subject, that M. Turgot, a man, certainly, of great sense and judgment, who was afterwards minister to the unfortunate Louis XVI, in a similar essay that he published, thought proper to sneer at this expression, saying that he could not understand what was meant by plans of ideas. The science was then in its infancy. Languages were considered only in respect to the etymology of their words and their affinity with each other. For more than three centuries, attempts had been made from time to time to collect materials for the comparison of languages. These consisted of vocabularies, and of the Lord's prayer printed in various idioms, but all on a very limited scale. Adelung has given us a list of those works at the end of the first volume of the Mithridates, beginning with Johann Schildberger, who, about the year 1427, at the end of a book of travels, published the Pater Noster in the Armenian and Tartar languages. In all these the science was considered as confined to the knowledge and comparison of words; the importance of the grammatical forms and internal structure of the various idioms might have struck some privileged minds, as it did that of M. Maupertuis, but it was far from being understood by the grammarians and philologists of that day. The science did not begin to extend its bounds until about the period of our revolution. Hervas, in 1784, published at Cesena, in the Roman states, his catalogue of known languages (Catalogo delle Lingue conosciute, e Notizia delle loro Affinità e Diversità), and afterwards his polyglot vocabulary of 150

languages, and a collection of the Lord's prayer in more than 300. But, while he was engaged in the composition of these works, an illustrious sovereign, at the other end of the eastern hemisphere, Catharine the Second, empress of Russia, was meditating another, on a plan much more extensive, which was no less than a comparative vocabulary of all the languages in the world. This noble idea she not only conceived, but actually carried into execution, with the aid of professor Pallas, for the languages of Asia and Europe, and of Mr. Theodore Jankiewitsch, for those of Africa and America. Then, and not till then, philology began to be a science. Still etymology alone was the only object which that great work had in view. The various structure of languages had not yet attracted the attention of the learned. In the celebrated French Encyclopédie, under the word Langue, languages, in this respect, are divided only into two classes, those which admit of inversions, like the Latin and Greek, and in some measure the German, and those which do not, like the French and some other modern European idioms. The monosyllabic Chinese, with its absence of forms, the polysyllabic and polysynthetic structure of the American languages, were not at all taken into consideration in the classification of the various modes of human speech; indeed, that classification had not even been attempted, either in respect to etymological affinities, or to the grammatical construction and arrangement of words; or, if some efforts were made, they were so limited in their range, and on the whole so unsatisfactory, that they are undeserving of any attention at this day. To two illustrious Germans, John Christopher Adelung, and his able successor, John Severin Vater, is due the honor of having first presented the world with a scientific classification of all the known languages, and a correct description of each idiom, particularly with regard to its grammatical structure. This was done in their admirable work, the Mithridates, a work so well known to the learned, that it is unnecessary to mention more than its title. We may venture to call this book, without fear of being contradicted, the fountain of all philological knowledge; and we do not hesitate to say that it deserves to be placed among the greatest and happiest efforts of the human mind. A translation of it into the English or French language has been long desired, and it is astonishing that no one has been yet found to attempt it. M. Balbi has lately pub

lished, at Paris, a valuable work, entitled Atlas Ethnographique du Globe, in which he gives a succinct view of the different languages, with the addition of the knowledge acquired since the publication of the Mithridates. But the form which he has adopted that of a large folio atlas, with synoptic tables-has prevented him from executing as perfect a work as he might otherwise have done with the knowledge and talent which he possesses; and we are compelled to say that a translation of the Mithridates is still a desideratum in the philological science. The fashionable mode, imitated from Lesage, of publishing every thing in the shape of an atlas, appears to us the most inconvenient that could have been chosen for a work of science. Besides the unwieldy size of those gigantic books, they have the incurable defect of being like the bed of Procrustes, where every thing must be condensed or dilated, so as to fill the given space allotted to each part of the subject. It is one of the childish whims of the present day, which, like all other similar faucies, will last only for a time, and be forgotten. Nevertheless, we do not mean to depreciate the work of M. Balbi. Next to the Mithridates, we think it the most useful book of its kind that has appeared within this century. It will afford considerable aid to those who apply themselves to the study of that science. We only regret that he . did not follow the method of his predecessors, which we think infinitely better adapted to the subject. The progress of philology since the publication of the empress Catharine's vocabulary and of the Mithridates, and particularly since the general pacification of 1814, is hardly to be conceived. We wish we could mention here all the valuable and important works that have appeared in the thirty years that have elapsed of the present century, in Russia, Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe and in the U. States, either on the general subject of languages, or on particular idioms till then little known, and some of which were even entirely unknown to the learned. The shortest notices that we could take of all those publications would fill more than the remainder of the space allotted to this article. It would give us infinite pleasure to expatiate on the labors of Adelung, Klaproth, the two Humboldts, De Sacy, Remusat, Jomard, St. Martin, Pougens, Burnouf, Akerblad, Young, Colebrooke, Champollion, Heeren, Eichhorn, Stewart, Murray, Barton, Hodgson, Pickering, Webster, and so many others, whose

names crowd so fast upon our pen, that we find ourselves obliged to stop, and proceed to another part of our subject. From the aggregate of the labors of these men and their illustrious predecessors, has resulted the science which we call philology a science as vast in its extent as interesting in its details. Like all other sciences, it requires to be subjected to some methodical order, in order that a comprehensive view may be taken of its whole extent, and a regular system pursued in the study of its component parts. We do not find that any attempt has been made in Europe to give to philology a definite form, by delineating its constituent members. We are, therefore, obliged to adopt, as the only one that we are acquainted with, the division which Mr. Duponceau has made of it, into three principal parts, which he calls phonology, etymology, and ideology, and which he defines as follows:

Phonology is the knowledge of the sounds produced by the human voice. It teaches us to distinguish those sounds, with their various tones, accents and inflections; to analyze, class and compare them with each other, and represent them as much as possible by visible signs. Etymology is the knowledge of those constituent parts of speech that we call words. By means of it we are enabled to trace the affinities of the different idioms of the earth, and the filiation of the numerous races and families of men who inhabit it; and, lastly, ideology is the comparative study of the grammatical forms and idiomatic structure of languages, by which we are taught to distinguish the different shapes in which ideas combine themselves, in order to fix perceptions in our minds, and transmit them to those of others. (See the Preface to the translation of Zeisberger's Grammar of the Lenni-Lenape, or Delaware Language, in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. iii, new series, p. 75.) Having adopted this division of our general subject, we shall, as briefly as possible, consider separately each of the three parts of which it is composed.

I. Phonology. This we have defined to be "the knowledge of the sounds produced by the human voice." According to this definition, it seems to include music, and it does, in fact, comprehend it; for music is a language, and the only one that may be called universal. It is true, that its sphere is limited; still it conveys the impression of passions and feelings from mind to mind by means of audible sounds, and, coupled with the language of

signs, which we call pantomime, there is hardly any thing that it cannot communicate. When we speak of the language of signs, we exclude those that are merely conventional, such as are taught to the deaf and dumb, or which they agree upon among themselves: we mean those alone proceeding from natural impulse, and which every one will understand without previous teaching. Music and pantomime, therefore, considered as means of communication between men, by awakening ideas, perceptions and feelings by means of audible sounds and visible signs, are parts of the general science of philology; and music, which speaks to the ear, comes properly within that division of it which we call phonology. The sounds of which music is composed have an immense advantage over all other sounds produced by the human voice. They are susceptible of being divided into parts, as minute and as nearly accurate as the ear can discriminate; so that their almost infinite combinations may, by a few conventional signs, be presented through the eye to the mental ear, in a uniform manner from one end of the world to the other. And this is not all: the duration of each sound, and of the intervals of silence, are as accurately marked by those signs as the sounds themselves; so that the most complicated piece of music is sung or executed at St. Petersburg in the same manner as it is at Canton or at Philadelphia: as far as it extends, therefore, music may be called a universal language.-It has been frequently asked whether the oratorical sounds or tones could not be described by signs, in the same manner as those of music. Various attempts have been made to that effect, and doctor James Rush, of Philadelphia, has written a very learned and ingenious treatise on the subject. But all such attempts have failed, and, from the nature of the thing, must always fail. We shall endeavor to explain the reason of this opinion. The musical sounds or tones proceeding from the grave to the acute, and vice versa, form, as it were, an ascending and descending line, easily divisible into parts, which the ear can appreciate. This effect is produced by certain organs, which operate by pressure, letting out of the mouth of the singer a greater or lesser quantity of air, and striking the external air variously, according to the manner in which they act, which it would be difficult and it is not necessary here to describe. Those organs, in speaking, are not called in the same 8

VOL. X.

manner into action; the tones of the speaker differ more from each other in strength than in acuteness or gravity--in short, speech is monotonous, when not modified by strong passion or feeling; and, in that case, it modulates within a very narrow compass, which is not susceptible of division, like the musical scale; and, indeed, the word modulation would be here improperly applied, for the rising and falling of the orator's voice, in speaking, is no more than what, in music, is called expression, and it is not more susceptible of notation in the one than in the other. The musician has his F. and FF., and P. and PP., for forte, fortissimo, and piano, pianissimo, and his marks > and <, to swell or diminish gradually the sound of a particular note: beyond that, he has no guide but his feeling and taste, and the instruction of a good master, aided by exercise and practice. This musicians call method. A man may read and write music in perfection, but, without method, he will not be a good singer; so one may read and write his language with perfect correctness; without method, he will not be an orator; and that method cannot be learned from notes or written signs, but must be acquired by instruction, exercise and practice, coupled with that natural disposition, without which there can be neither a musician nor an orator. But if the sounds which are the elements of speech are not divisible in the same manner as those from which music proceeds, they are, nevertheless, susceptible of discrimination from each other, and may be divided into classes, though not into intervals. A much greater number of organs concurs in their production than in that of the musical tones. The head, the breast, the lungs, the throat, the lips, the tongue, the palate, the teeth, and even the nose-all lend their aid to the formation of the wonderful mechanism of language. M. Court de Gébelin has described anatomically the manner in which the different sounds are produced, in his Histoire naturelle de la Parole, to which we refer our readers. In the analysis of these sounds, and in the means of representing them by visible signs, consists the principal part of the branch of science which we call phonology. This seems easy at first view, particularly when we consider the small number of elementary signs contained in our alphabets, which are, in general, sufficient for practical use in the languages to which they are applied, and to which they belong; but, if we extend our prospect, and attempt to describe all