I shall be much obliged by your kindly laying before your readers a few facts in reply to what Prof. Whitney has done me the honour to publish in the New York Critic upon my Ilchester Lectures.

1. Prof. Whitney says: Ancient Egyptian is Dr. Abel's special study, and his fame as a scholar rests mainly on his Egyptian work.' For a remark so closely verging upon the personal this is singularly inaccurate. Besides my Egyptian work, I have been publishing for the last fourteen years books, treatises, and essays upon comparative lexicography, semasiology, and psychological linguistics. The languages treated in these publications are chiefly English, Latin, Hebrew, and Russian. Notices concerning this part of my work, by Profs. Pott, Sayce, Misteli, Dieterici, SchweizerSidler, Palmer, Lazarus, Bastian, Bruchmann, Duboc and others, were, some of them, in print ten years ago.

2. Prof. Whitney is good enough to go on: Dr. Abel is a deep thinker and venturesome speculator on the phenomena of primitive language: with what effect upon the opinion of other scholars remains to be determined, since his contributions to the subject are of recent date.' My first treatise on primitive language, printed in June, 1879, is a discursive repetition of facts published in my Coptic Researches,' toward the latter end of 1876. Not one Egyptian scholar has since contradicted inversion or any of the cognate fundamental facts alluded to in reference to primitive speech. 3. Farther on, Prof. Whitney observes: Dr. Abel appears to over-estimate, and that in no small degree, the reach and scope of his comparisons. It is the fate of words everywhere, and under all circumstances, to extend, contract, and shift their applications, and these processes of change are of course liable to be in some points quickened and heightened, when a people adopts a new tongue. But there is nothing in Dr. Abel's instances which might not be paralleled out of languages that have gone down by direct and quiet descent from father to son.' The scope of my comparisons is to prove that Slavic significations, preserved in purely Slavic lands, have considerably changed in Finno-Russian speech: the requisite proof being given, the scope of the comparison is reached. As to whether similar changes might not be discovered in other languages, quietly handed down from father to son, this is a point I neither affirm nor deny; my only aim being to show that, in this particular instance, a differentiating change on the largest scale has occurred in the borrowed lauguage, without taking place in the mothertongue. I am, however, constrained to add that, besides being unprovoked, Prof. Whitney's remark on change of meaning is very erroneous. Meanings no doubt change in all languages; but the particular change occurring in a particular tongue is expressive of national peculiarity of thought, and is hardly ever repeated in exactly the same form, wise, and hue in any other idiom. Still less are quite a number of such changes ever repeated. If Prof. Whitney's remark were true, national semasiology, synonymy and psychology would not exist.

4. In his concluding remarks on the same point my learned critic holds the following language: Unless one succeeds in grasping the whole vocabulary of a tongue, in its details and in their sum, and can hold them beside the like totality of others (a well-nigh impossible task), this method of comparison cannot well lead to solid results.' To grasp the Russian concept of liberty, it cannot be necessary to analyze the Russian notion of space, time, or revenge as well. Cognate notions, such as manliness, independence, etc., might indeed be profitably treated side by side with liberty. No doubt the task is great. But in setting itself a task of tremendous proportions, comparative lexicography is in the same glorious predicament as every other branch of philology. It is, moreover, in its first infancy; to charge the new teaching with incompleteness, is to complain of an imperfection which it will require centuries to remedy.

5. Prof. Whitney proceeds to offer a grave and complex objection: (A) The author speaks as if some transforming process passed over the whole mind and sense of one who learns and uses a new tongue; (B) as if it might reasonably be held, that a nation is raised to the intellectual status of any language it may happen to acquire. But this is exaggeration. There are infinite degrees of difference in respect to knowledge and culture between the speakers of the same cultivated tongue; pure ignorance or brutishness may manifest themselves in English or in German accents. (C) One who comes in from outside and acquires such a tongue simply learns to carry on and express the acts of mind and soul, to

which he is equal, by the help of a new instrumentality. ... An English speaker, who adds to his acquisitions Chinese or Ojibway, remains the same person though he learns to use the old tongue and the new with equal freedom, even though he in a measure forget his English and put the other language in its place.'

To each of these pregnant observations I shall give a special reply: A. In no passage of my book do I contend that one who learns and uses a new tongue undergoes a transforming process of his whole mind and sense. In no passage do I deny that an English speaker remains the same person, though he learn to use Chinese with equal freedom as English, and even, in a measure, forgets his own language. What I submit is that if an individual adopts a foreign tongue, to the entire replacement of his own, then that part of a man's intellectual identity, which is comprised in language, may be absolutely effaced and a new set of standard ideas imprinted upon his mind.' Accordingly my statement is the reverse of what Prof. Whitney finds fault with. B. My query, whether any nation is not raised to the intellectual status of any language it may happen to acquire,' is disposed of by Prof. Whitney insisting that a German brute remaine a brute, though he may learn English and carry on the acta of mind and soul to which he is equal by the help of a new instrumentality.' Does the criticism touch the assertion it is intended to refute? A whole nation occupies the level of its language; the individual member of a nation moves on that part of the level accessible to himself. In learning English a German brute preferably takes to the brutal part of the tongue, and, if Anglicized to the entire replacement of his native idiom, is changed in the style and type of his brutality only. His general character remains the same; the specific mould of his views undergoes denationalization. He will speak of kicking as an Englishman, when, as a German, he would, preferably, have spoken of Holzen.' Prof. Whitney's observation marked C, admitting this, will be found to answer his observation marked B.

6, According to Prof. Whitney, Dr. Abel repeatedly insists that ancient Egyptian is considerably the oldest language in the world.' I never said this. I said that ancient Egyptian records probably contain the oldest preserved specimens of human speech.' This invalidates other remarks based upon the attribution to me of the statement that Egyptian is older than other tongues.

7. Egyptian,' Prof. Whitney goes on, at its earliest beginnings was already the tongue of a highly developed people. We have no reason to believe that either Semites or Indo-Europeans of the same period were anywhere nearly so far advanced, and yet there was nothing of this alleged Egyptian chaos in their speech.' The preserved authentic and deciphered specimens of ancient Semite or IndoEuropean speech being very considerably younger than the oldest linguistic relics of Egypt, naturally display a more advanced state of language. Moreover, the most ancient Egyptian records preserved are composed not in the tongue of the time from which they date. but in that of an earlier age, in which the priestly dictionary and grammar werein the main settled once for all. Thirdly, even in its highest development, Egyptian never attained anything like the distinctness and versatility of either Semite or IndoEuropean tongues. No wonder, then, it was more primitive in the period referred to.

8. My learned critic's remonstrance is carried on thus: 'No tongue, of however rude a tribe, has ever been met with in real use in a condition even remotely resembling that of the cultivated Egyptian as described by our author.' As regards the date of the Egyptian speech analyzed by me, I may refer my critic to what has just been stated. With reference to the occurrence of similar phenomena in other languages, I have undertaken to prove one branch of IndoEuropean languages to contain numerous instances of inversion of sound and sense: to prove his own assertion, I beg to submit that Prof. Whitney should have disproved mine. 9. Prof. Whitney winds up with a telling reservation: 'Until Dr. Abel or some one else finds such another primitive tongue, or until other Egyptian scholars come to his support (for his views are not yet known to be shared by any one else), and assure us that the facts of hieroglyphic language read unmistakably thus, and not otherwise, we shall be at liberty to hold our own opinion in suspense." The hieroglyphics quoted in my disquisition concerning Egyptian and primitive grammar are, with hardly an exception, read according to the accepted interpretation of