If the process of heating coal gas, in order to remove the sulphur contained in it, should be employed on the manufacturing scale, the rate of transmission of the gas through the heating apparatus would necessarily be such as to render any deposition of carbon very unlikely. But even where such deposition takes place, it is not necessarily accompanied by a diminution of the illuminating power.

An interesting experiment, from this point of view, is the decomposition of marsh gas by the electric spark. When a stream of sparks from a Ruhmkorff coil is transmitted between the ends of platinum wires through a small quantity of marsh gas enclosed in a glass tube over mercury, the gas gradually expands. In about ten minutes it is nearly doubled, and at the same time a black deposit appears on the tube, in the neighbourhood of the wires. Here the intense heat applied has effected an almost complete decomposition of the hydrocarbon into its elements. But at the same time there is found a small quantity of some more condensed hydrocarbon, probably acetylene. On expelling the gas through a jet attached to the upper end of the tube, and burning it, the flame is seen to be much more luminous than that of marsh gas itself. The fact of which this experiment gives a striking illustration is that the illuminating power of gas depends much more upon the nature of the hydrocarbons it contains, than upon the total amount of carbon. How great would be the gain to the manufacturers of coal gas, if such an operation as this were possible on the large scale, by which the volume of gas is doubled and its illuminating power, at the same time, greatly increased!

As far as chemistry is concerned, the simple operation of heating. gas appears to offer the means of a sufficiently perfect purification. The construction of a suitable system of iron pipes for heating the gas, and the best mode of obtaining and applying heat, is a problem for the engineer. On the scale on which gas is manufactured, all the apparatus for dealing with it must be of a magnitude to which it is difficult to pass, even in imagination, from the small scale of laboratory experiments; but, otherwise, the problem does not appear to be one of any peculiar difficulty. It may perhaps be found possible to employ some of the waste heat of the retort-house for this purpose, and thus to effect the required purification without much increasing the consumption of fuel.

[A. V. H.]

WEEKLY EVENING MEETING,

Friday, April 26, 1872.

WILLIAM SPOTTISWOODE, Esq. LL.D. M.A. Treasurer R.S. and R.I. Vice-President, in the Chair.

JOHN STUART BLACKIE, F.R.S.E.

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH,

On the Philological Character and Genius of the Modern Greek

Language.

THE Greek language, as the only living bridge between the intellect of the present and that of the great past, is certainly one of the most remarkable phenomena in the field of philology. To show how this wonderful language has retained its vitality, and now flourishes in a green old age, or rather in a lusty rejuvenescence, while Hebrew, Latin, Sanscrit, and all the great bearers of ancient culture, are numbered with the dead, is one object of the present discourse; and the other object is to take the language in the phasis ultimately assumed, and by analysis endeavour to set forth succinctly the chief characteristics of this most recent type.

In following the historical fates of this famous language, the fundamental principle with which we must start is that there is no such thing as absolute fixation in a living language. All language, so long as it lives, that is, so long as it is the organ of expression to a living people, and is not summed up to a bookish finality by lexicographers and commentators, must be subject to the change which is of the very essence of life. But though in a living language the vital force must constantly be at work, and will always be sending forth new shoots, as a vigorous tree sends forth new branches, this tendency to change is kept under the strongest check by those conservative forces universal in nature, which strive obstinately to keep up an existing type, when once established. These forces are of two kinds, internal and external; the internal are the powers of commanding intellect, of plastic genius, to which the masses of men instinctively concede an authority in matters of style and expression; the external are the two great institutions of Church and State, acting either from one common centre, or from two distinct, and in their own domain equally powerful, centres. The effect of such great centres of political and social action in setting a limit to the local VOL. VI. (No. 57.)

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varieties of human speech, and stamping some favoured form of a language with a despotic authority, is too obvious to require illustration. Now with respect to both these classes of forces, the Greek language possesses a momentum, and springs of permanent energy, such as have fallen to the lot of none of the great ancient languages. A long succession of poets, philosophers, and scientific men in every field of intellectual expression, created and sustained for that form of human speech an intellectual dictatorship which could only be shaken by disturbing forces of the most violent kind. But when to this inherent imperial power of intellect there was added the unifying influence of a strong centralizing government at Byzantium, and the intense inspiration of a common Christian Church at once popular in its doctrine and aristocratic in its government, the combined conservative forces became so strong that the rankest undergrowth of linguistic mutation in the uneducated classes of society was unable to peer into the light, above the luxuriant leafage of the magnificent old forest of inherited classicality. That such an undergrowth did exist at Byzantium we have the amplest evidence in the two poems written in the popular dialect by the monk Theodorus Ptochoprodromus, about the middle of the twelfth century, and dedicated to the Emperor Manuel Comnenus. These poems are written in a dialect so corrupt, that it is extremely difficult, even with the help of the commentary of the learned Greek Adamantine Koraes,* in not a few places, to fish out their meaning. There existed, therefore, in Byzantium at the time of the Crusades, and when the Greek Empire was tottering surely, though very slowly and unwillingly, to its fall, a distinct and well-marked bistratification of the Greek tongue-the phenomenon of a classical type of speech inherited from the mighty past, used as the only legitimate form of expression by all men of education, and co-existent with this a vulgar type, the natural organ of the uneducated masses, and used by them in their colloquies, ballads, songs, and other light fly-leaves of purely popular expression. This bistratification continued with no doubt increasing force to mark the speech of the Greek people till the great shake which their nationality received from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453; and from this date it might naturally have been expected that, one of the strongest conservative bonds having been snapt asunder, the cohesive force that maintained the old classical type would cease, and a new language, standing to ancient Greek in the same relation that Italian does to Latin, would arise out of the debris of the crushed nationality of the conquered, mingled with the intruded elements of the foreign conquest. But this event did not take place; and why? first, because the weight of inherited intellectual and ecclesiastical authority was far higher in the case of Greek than in that of Latin ; and again, because the character of the Ottoman policy and religion was such as to render a fusion between the language of the conquered

*In the first volume of his "ATAKTα.

and the conquerors such as took place in Italy to a certain extent, and in England to a much larger extent-impossible. The Greeks hated the Turk with an intense hatred, even when they condescended, as in the case of the Fanariotes, to serve him, and to make profit of him; so that the smothered embers of patriotism, of which the language was a part, were fanned into a flame by the very forces that under different circumstances would have extinguished them. The Greek language therefore, in spite of that terrible dilapidation and prostration of the old social fabric, remained Greek, and no new language, as in the nations of Western Europe, was created; and it continued for four centuries, till the great revolt in 1821, sprinkled, no doubt, or spotted over in various motley phases with barbarisms and adulterations, presenting characteristic local varieties of a debased type, very offensive to the nice nose of academical men, but retaining all the while a stout muscular heart pumping with genuine Hellenic vitality, and able at any moment to throw off the scurf and blotches of a merely external affection, when purer air and a more nourishing diet should have produced a healthy condition of the popular blood. It was in this state that the Greek language was found by the great patriot and scholar whom we have already named, Adamantine Koraes (nat. 1748), who, in a long series of learned works, effectually established himself as an authority in the constitution of the fixed type which the Greek tongue, after so many centuries of unkindly handling, was ultimately destined to assume. Koraes distinctly saw that, if the Greek language was to be used by Greek men of letters, for the purpose of improving and elevating the Greek people, it could only be in a genuine popular form, that is to say, by shaking off altogether the polished affectations of the inherited classical speech, and addressing the living Greek people in that living form of speech which they had sucked in with their mothers' milk. While doing this, however, it was by no means necessary that this noble friend of his oppressed people should adopt every peculiarity of the popular dialect that was manifestly the result of blind ignorance or random carelessness. With a nice discriminative perspicacity he seized the grand features of the Romaic idiom, while he brushed away or washed off its superficial defacements. In fact, with the wisdom of a practical man, he made a compromise between the utterly chaotic corruptions of the lowest ballads of Cretan or Epirotic Greek, and the style of bookish rather than of popular origin, to which the learned Greeks naturally inclined; and this compromise -the result not of Koraes' literary position solely, but of a general under-current of national feeling-produced what is now called the Neo-Hellenic dialect, to distinguish it from the Romaic, or lowest popular stratum of Greek, inherited from the uneducated masses of the Byzantine Empire.

In now attempting a succinct philological analysis of this type of Greek speech, we must bear in mind that, from the very nature of the case, there is no such fixed standard of modern Greek as there was of

classical Greek in the days of Attic supremacy. For the existing Neo-Hellenic, the best standard, no doubt, may be assumed to be the Greek newspapers; but from the strong tendency to purification and restoration which has manifested itself among all Greek writers since the great popular up-rising of 1821, it is better for philological analysis to take the current Greek of the last century, affected to a certain extent by Italian influences, as a just mean between the extreme corruption of the Cretan dialect, and the Greek of the modern Greek newspapers, which present, according to the taste of their writers, in not a few points, a greater or less approximation to the ancient classical style. To tune my ear to this genuine Romaic as contrasted with a restored semi-classical Greek, I have been in the habit of using a translation of the Arabian Nights,' published at Venice in 1792; but I have also carefully read through the chivalrous poem of the Erotocritus,' composed by Vincentius Cornaro, a Cretan Greek, about the beginning of the last century; as also the collections of popular Greek ballads by Passow, Kind, and others, the peculiarities of which, however disowned in the written style of educated Greeks, could not be overlooked by the philologer. It is proper to state also that, though the propositions which I lay down. are drawn out directly from a pretty wide field of Romaic reading, I was both confirmed in my conclusions, and greatly benefited in my researches, by the excellent works of those few others who have worked laboriously in this neglected corner of the Hellenic vineyard. The names of Sophocles, Mullach, Passow, Ellisen, Pashley, Tozer, Geldart, Clyde, Le Grand, d'Eichthal, and the late Viscount Strangford, will sufficiently indicate to the intelligent the sources from which I have derived the greatest amount of assistance.

The first remark that we feel called on to make, in sketching the physiognomy of modern Greek, is by way of protest against the vulgar notion that all the changes which take place in a language deviating from an inherited classical type, are to be considered as corruptions, or varieties of phonetic decay. No doubt both Italian and modern Greek, when contrasted with classical Latin and Attic Greek, contain not a little of what, with strict scientific precision, may fall under the head of corruption; but the mistake lies in the easy presumption that this category covers the whole facts of the case. The truth rather is that, while by the slackness of the controlling power of the conservative forces, any language may be encrusted with corruption or have its finest features rubbed off by phonetic decay, it may at the same time, through the force of its vigorous vitality, go on sending forth new blossoms, and revelling in fresh formations which are in no sense corruptions, but only the legitimate outgrowth, foliation, and efflorescence of an essentially vital thing. The test of the true character of such new formations, to the eye of the philologer, is not the artificial authority of some fashionable Cicero or other great master of style, but simply the conformity or non-conformity of the recent growth with the old type of which it purports to be a part. There