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To the series of propositions printed in a larger type, which embody the leading facts constituting the History of the Language, and which perhaps might be advantageously committed to memory by young persons, have been subjoined the more important of those minor and subsidiary particulars brought forward in the Lectures of which I have been accustomed to direct that notes should be taken. In this way the student or reader is put in possession of all the information necessary for the complete understanding of the general statements, and for following the survey of the subject so far as they carry it.

Compendious, too, and elementary as the book is, it is constructed in part with a view to its serving as an introduction both to English History and to so much of the great modern science of Ethnology as depends upon the descent and relationship of languages.

The Specimens of the Language in its successive stages, which are appended, are far from displaying a complete map of its progress and developement; yet they furnish many illustrations of the general course which it has taken, and of the nature of the changes which have brought it from the original Anglo-Saxon to its present state. Every necessary explanation of those of earlier date which I have

been able to supply will be found in the translations or glossarial interpretations annexed. In some few instances I have been obliged to content myself with the commonly received text, even where its correctness may be somewhat doubtful, and where it might perhaps admit of being amended by recourse to better manuscripts; but I believe that the most trustworthy printed editions have in all cases been consulted and adhered to.

G. L. C.

London, October 1851.

OUTLINES,

&c.

I. There are two kinds of Evidence by which the origin or composition of any product may be attested-the Internal; and the External, or Historical.

THE distinction is, that the Internal Evidence is furnished by the product itself; the External, by something else.

I find a block of stone lying in a field; whence has it come or been brought? It cannot have grown out of the earth, and it was not wont to be there. Examining the nature and quality of the stone, I ascertain them to be the same with those of a neighbouring rock with which I am well acquainted. This is internal evidence, evidence afforded by the fragment itself, that it has been detached from that rock. External evidence to the same effect would be the traces of its passage along the descending ground from the rock to its present position, or the declaration of some observer who had actually seen it breaking off or rolling down.

B.

But the distinction is not always so simple. What would be any correspondence that might be detected between the surface of the stone, where it had apparently been recently broken off from something else, and a freshly exposed part of the rock? It would be internal evidence to the mind having already a knowledge of the state of the rock, but only external to him to whom the state of the rock was an after discovery. For, in the former case, the fact, in the particular light or presentment in which alone it is evidence,—that is to say, as connecting the stone with the rock, — would be supplied by the object of speculation itself; in the latter case, it would be supplied by something without the object of speculation.

This goes to illustrate and explain what we so often see, the total failure of a fact or appearance, which leads one observer to a certain conclusion, to produce any such conviction or impression upon another person of equal general intelligence and acuteness, and equally cognizant of the particular fact. The fact meets with something to coalesce with in the one mind which it does not find in the other. Niebuhr has put this strikingly, in reference to himself and his readers, in commencing the second volume of his History of Rome:"When an inquirer, after gazing for years, with ever renewed, undeviating stedfastness, sees the history of mistaken, misrepresented, and forgotten events rise out of mists and darkness, and assume substance and shape, as the scarcely visible aerial form of the nymph in the Sclavonic tale takes the body of an earthly maiden beneath the yearning gaze of love,— when by unwearied and conscientious examination he is continually gaining a clearer insight into the connexion

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