What we Owe the Ancients

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 46, 2 October 1890, Page 4

What we Owe the Ancients

In lecturing on " Some Lessons I Antiquuy/' "Frofesaor Max Muller •howed how much we were indebted to the ancieata for the very necessaries of intellectual existence. Our writing came, from ..Egypt. Whenever we wrote an a, or a b, or a c, we wrote what Was originally an hieroglyphic pfcfcw. .*.' VSThen lam told," again he^ayfi; "that the Hinduß were mere dreams, and never made any twieful discovery, such as our steam, engines arid electric telegraph. I tell sny friends that they invented that without w;biefh mechanical and electric science could never become what they are, that without which we should: never have: had steam engines or electric telegraphs — they invented our figures: if rbm Ito 9— and more than that: invented the nought, the sign for nothing, one of the most u»# ful discoveries ever made, as ul matbematiciaSis 'will tell you. We get our division of tim^ from the ancient Babylonia, and our idea of coinage from the Greeks, But greater than all tb^se heirlooma of the ages was that bf; language which we bad received 'froai'lbur ancestors, and wbichhad. grown from century to century ufitil it had reached a wealth nnaurpassad anywhere, amounting in English alone to 250,000 words. 'All the languajge~€~oi the civilised races of Europe, thW languages of Jf ersia and India alsoj'alf sprang from one source. •'lf," hrtßaid,^ " yqapbic'e i*efore imagination a map of Europe and 1 Asia you.-Vqufcl Bee_all the -fairest . portions lof . tlloae ' two continenta, all the counfeie^ ir^ere .you^caii. discover; historical 'monuments, temples, palaces, fbruins, churches, or hoiises of parliament li'ghte<r -up by the rags bf that ond ; ' language, ' ■ ith^ ' 'classical language t^of 'the past, the 1 'liyiiig language -at the present, and in the distant future the true Vblapuk the iaiigTiage-ofth* world." .;