of Kentucky made across the eastern part of the State, from Greenup County to the Tennessee State line, by Jos. Lesley, Jr., Asst. under the direction of Dr. David Dale Owen, State Geologist, in the summers of 1858 and 1859;--and described its most remarkable features along the western outcrop of the eastern coal field.

Nominations Nos. 392, 393 were balloted for, and new nomination No. 394 was read.

A quorum for the enacting of laws not being present, the special business of the evening was postponed.

The ballot being scrutinised, the following persons were declared duly elected members of the Society: JUDGE HENRY CARLETON, of Philadelphia. Dr. WM. A. HAMMOND, U. S. A. And the Society was adjourned.

Stated Meeting, November 4, 1859.

Dr. Wood, President, in the Chair.

Present, sixteen members.

Letters were read from the R. A. Dijon, the R. S. Göttingen, the R. Geog. S. London, the R. S. London, the Mass. H. S. acknowledging the receipt of Proceedings Nos. 57 and 58;—from the Mass. H. S. Worcester, the P. H. S. Philada. and the State Librarian, Harrisburg, acknowledging the receipt of Transactions, Vol. XI. Part 2 ;- from the R. P. A. Berlin, acknowledging complete sets of Transactions and Proceedings;- from the N. H. S. Emden and R. P. A. Berlin, announcing the transmission of donations for the Library;-from the Librarian R. L. Rio de Janeiro, and M. Brockhaus, dated Leipsig, Nov. 10, 1858, informing the society of new arangements for correspondence with Brazil and South America.

A letter was read from Henry Carleton dated Philada. Oct. 24, 1859, acknowledging the receipt of notice of his election. The following donations for the Library were announced :— Greenwich Observations for 1857.-From the Royal Society. Lond. Teneriffe Astron. Exper. Lond. and Edin. 4to. 1859.-From R. Soc. Maxima and Minima, solved by Algebra, by Ramchundra. (200 pp.) London, 1859.-From the same.

8vo.

Proceedings R. S. London. Nos. 32 to 35.

8vo.-From R. Soc. Philos. Trans. R. S. London. Parts I. II. 1858. 4to.-From R. Soc. List of Members, 30th November, 1858.-From the same. Report of the Joint Committee of R. S. and B. Ass. for procuring a continuance of the magnetical and meteorological observations, (16 pp.) 8vo.--From the same.

--

Proc. R. Geog. S. Lond. Vol. III. Parts III. IV. V. From the Soc. Peelpark R. Mus. and Lib. 10th An. Rep. (40 pp.) 8vo. Manchester. Journ. Bath and W. E. S. 1859. Vol. VII. London.-From the Soc. Proc. Geol. and Poly. S. W. R. York. 1858-9. Leeds.-From the Soc. An. Rep. Leeds Phil. and Literary S. 1858-9.-From the Soc. Journ. R. Dublin Soc. Nos. XII. XIII. 1859. Dub.-From the Soc. Journ. R. Asiatic Soc. Vol. XVII. Part 1. Lond.-From the Soc. Jour. S. Arts and I. in U. April-Aug. (May wanting.)—From the Soc. Atlantis. No. II. III. IV. July, 1858-July, 1859. Lond.—C. U. Dublin. Mém. Acad. I. Dijon. 6 vols. (1857.) Paris. From the Academy. Verhand. Natur. Ver. Bonn. 14 J. 2, to 15 J. 4.-From the Univer. Jahresbericht 44th Natur. Ges. Emden, 1858.-From the Society. Nachr. G. A. Uni. 1858, No. 1-28. Göttingen.-From the Uni. Verhand. Gartenbau. 6 J. 2 h. No. 1-14. Berlin.-From the Union. Monatsb. K. Preus. A. Berlin. July, Dec. 1858.-From the Acad. Meteor. Inst. Berlin. Weather Tables for 1855-8.-From the Inst. Jahrbuch K. K. Geol. Reichsan. 1858, IX. 4.—From the Institute. Mittheilungen K. K. Geog. Gesell. 1859, III. 1.-From the Society. L'Acad. Paris, Compte-Rendu. April, 1855.-From the Academie. Trans. Acad. Sci. St. Louis, 1859. I. No. 3.-From the Acad. Hartford Asylum. 43d An. Rept. May, 1859.-From Directors. Hartford Retreat. 35th An. Rep. April, 1859.-From the Officers. Gen. Ass. Conn. Minutes, June, 1859. N. Haven.-From the Soc. Method of studying Physiology. J. A. Meigs.-From the Author. Description of Skull from Jerusalem. J. A. Meigs.-From the Aut. Cat. of Mammalia in the Museum H. E. I. Co. Calcutta.

1851. By Thos. Horsfield.-From the Author.

London,

The Committee to which was referred the paper of Dr. Le Conte read at the last meeting reported in favour of its publication in the Transactions, which was ordered accordingly and the Committee discharged.

A quorum for the enactment of laws not being present, the special business of the evening was again postponed.

Pending nomination No. 394 was read, and the Society was adjourned.

On the Insensible Gradation of Words, by J. P. Lesley.

What practically happened years ago to every fossil—namely, to be studied in isolation, its surroundings and alliances unknown, is still to a great extent, the fate of those fossils of the intellectual world, words. When a word spoken by the people on this side of the globe is seen or heard to be like a word spoken by the people on the other side, if the meanings attached to its duplicate utterance can be allied, and especially if several such alliances can be catalogued, although merely as bald facts, ethnological reasoning upon origins and migrations is at once proceeded with. It cannot be denied that the science of comparative philology, although by no means in its infancy, labours under the defects of this rude method. Its grammars indeed are getting to be finished and proper tools for the scientific workman, but its vocabularies are still of a barbarous and impracticable kind, mere museums of popular curiosities. It still remains a subject for future demonstration, that in philology, as in paleontology, the boundaries of genus and species are to be accounted conterminous; that the organic forms pass into each other by almost insensible gradations; and that not by hazard but by plan; and finally not by a plan dependent upon the merely accidental variation of radical elements, but on a plan of the variable and alternate development of members of a complex structure.

Philology, as to its history, has three departments. First, the purely organic, containing all such involuntary or animal utterances, as the different species of men make, for the same natural reason that different species of animals quack, cluck, crow, scream, bark, bray, howl or roar, each with sounds fixed by the quality of its organs and by the emotions of its inner nature. It is to be expected that the child's organs will utter modifications of a given sound uttered with the same intent by an adult; and that one child will prefer guttural and another child labial utterances. It is reasonable, also, to expect that the African, the Malayan, the Esquimo, the Germanic groups of languages will be radically characterized by different soft and hard expressions, by liquid prefixes or guttural affixes, by sibilants, chucklings, and murmurs of their own, as we find they actually are. The study of this department has been vigorously prosecuted in one direction by able men, among whom, in this country, Kraitzer and Haldeman may be named as taking the lead. These have pointed out a multitude of true natural expressions. They tell us, for instance, that the Latin ex, K, S, and the English ou-t, may

VOL. VII.-R

be known by the very sound itself to mean expulsion from the inside outward. And so of many other words. But the range of this investigation has been hitherto kept narrow by the neglect of the other direction in which these studies should move on. No one has yet seriously taken up the true characteristics of natural language, such as the clucks of Oregon and Caffraria, the final K of the hypoborean race, the infantine TL of Mexico and other local regions, the softly vocalized finals of Southern Europe, the utter abandonment of the Polynesian race to vowelism, the monosyllabic humour of the Sinitic stock, to study these in the same spirit with which Gardner and Nuttall studied the sounds of birds; to study them, in fact, in connection and in harmony with other specific differences of men not as men, but as animals. Yet until this is done, comparative philology has obtained no starting point.

The second department of philology is that of pure Bardic or Mythologic words-words which are to be studied as inventions and not as involuntary organizations; to be regarded truly as fossils, scattered, fragmentary, inverted, pscudo morphed; and, when understood, instructing us far more likely about migrations of mind than of body; rather about the exodus of priesthoods and sects than of races; about a picturesque, mysterious propaganda of symbols by priests and their initiated, and not about the carriage of household sounds, war cries, or love whispers, from one locality or habitation to another, by men still half animals.

And the third department of philological investigation deals with these same empirical constructions, these originally crystallized bardisms, not in their first forms, but in their secondary or sedimentary condition, as words broken down, pulverized, readjusted and cemented; as words with some of their elements abstracted and with new elements infiltrated; tinged by climate and social habits, and metamorphosed by the logic, art and science of successive generations. To use a geological simile, there are many primary regions of philology like Bretagne and Western Ireland, Northern Spain, Dalmatia and the Caucasus, Ceylon, New Holland, or any other remote and secluded lands, where the elementary sounds of the ancient wordmakers still present themselves for comparison and analysis almost in their original phases. On the other hand most of the languages of the world and all the languages of the historic, artistic and scientific nations are of a genuine secondary order and need to be studied first as to their grosser ingredients, and these again secondly in a finer analysis. And one object of the charts presented here is to show in

reference to this last, that a few elements of a primary order are every. where employed in language as in chemistry, to construct elements of a second order and a third and a fourth, by a few simple laws of change, in such a series of gradations, that any word out of the thousand used commonly by any people may be selected indifferently and discussed with the same results as any other word; that even any given compound word will be found present in some well recognized form in nearly all the languages known, and yet will have different meanings in most of them; that there is therefore not the most distant approach to a common or universal language for all mankind beyond the fact that all use the same elements in the same endless round of composition, and cannot get out of this round; that the presence of the same words in two or more languages is therefore no prima facie evidence of kinship between the two or more tribes speaking those languages; that, therefore, ethnology cannot be considered as having yet taken hold of philology as one of its tools by the right handle, or turned it to any useful purpose beyond the determination of very local questions. It can be shown, probably, that the study of philology must be distributed between-first, a strict investigation by expert naturalists into the primary animal sounds made by the species or varieties of mankind; secondly, an investigation of those words in hieroglyphic, classical and mediæval history and mythology which remain to represent those old introduced non-animal, transcendental ideas by invented signs, by arbitrarily attached sounds, and by mysteriously arranged syllables; and thirdly, the classification of all words used to express such ideas in modern times, according to the laws now so well understood and obeyed in the study of chemical elements, fossils, and objects of the actual nature.

The charts appended to this paper will speak for themselves in explanation of these views. They represent the gradual passage, through groups of forms, of the names which mankind have given to the five objects, MAN, HEAD, HAIR, HAND and STONE, in 200 languages, more or less. They have been made up from the Russian Comparative Vocabulary of Catherine I, from the Mithridates, from Comparative Vocabularies of the dialects of the Caucasus, from Hale's Volume of the Exploring Expedition, and a few other sources of information open to all. Very few of the African words, however, are given, and only enough American words for comparison, as the object was to illustrate the subject, not to furnish a perfect specimen. In selecting letters the expression of the sound has been kept in view as the primary object, where it did not conceal the graduation. Hence