he began to see the kind of general form which such a bird must
have presented, and finally, putting one thing to another, and
fitting part to part, he declared it to be a bird of gigantic
size, and of a particular character, which he was able to
describe; and this opinion was confirmed by later discoveries of
other bones and fragments, so that an almost complete skeleton
of the Dinornis may now be seen in this country. Well, our
knowledge of the Aryan people, and of our own descent from them,
has been found out in much the same way. Learned men observed,
as a curious thing, that in various European languages there
were words of the same kind, and having the same root forms;
they found also that these forms of roots existed in the older
language of Greece; and then they found that they existed also
in Sanskrit, the oldest language of India--that in which the
sacred books of the Hindus are written. They discovered,
further, that these words and their roots meant always the same
things, and this led to the natural belief that they came from
the same source. Then, by closer inquiry into the _Vedas_, or
Hindu sacred books, another discovery was made, namely, that
while the Sanskrit has preserved the words of the original
language in their most primitive or earliest state, the other
languages derived from the same source have kept some forms
plainly coming from the same roots, but which Sanskrit has lost.
Thus we are carried back to a language older than Sanskrit, and
of which this is only one of the forms, and from this we know
that there was a people which used a common tongue; and if
different forms of this common tongue are found in India, in
Persia, and throughout Europe, we know that the races which
inhabit these countries must, at sometime, have parted from the
parent stock, and must have carried their language and their