The  first  great  achievement  of  comparative  philology  has
been  that  of  demonstrating,  beyond  all  possibility  of  question,
that  language  as  it  now  exists  did  not  appear  ready-made,
or  by  way  of  any  specially  created  intuition.  Comparative
philology  has  furnished  a  completed  proof  of  the  fact  that
language,  as  we  now  know  it,  has  been  the  result  of  a
gradual     evolution.       In     the     chapter     on     "Comparative


GENERAL  SUMMARY  AND  CONCLUDING  REMARKS.    415

Philology,"  therefore,  I  briefly  traced  the  principles  of
languaf^e  growth,  so  far  as  these  are  now  well  recognized  by
all  philologists.  It  was  shown,  as  a  matter  of  classification,
that  the  thousand  or  more  existing  languages  fall  into  about
one  hundred  families,  all  the  members  of  each  family  being
more  or  less  closely  allied,  while  members  of  different  families
do  not  present  evidence  of  genetic  affinity.  Nevertheless,
these  families  admit  of  being  comprised  under  larger  groups
or  "  orders,"  in  accordance  with  certain  characteristics  of
structure,  or  type,  which  they  present.  Of  these  types  all
philologists  are  agreed  in  distinguishing  between  the
Isolating,  the  Agglutinating,  and  the  Inflectional.  Some
philologists  make  a  similar  distinction  between  these  and
the  Polysynthetic,  while  all  are  agreed  that  from  the  agglu-
tinative the  Incorporating  type  has  been  derived,  and  from
the  inflectional  the  Analytic.
