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This Book List Sectory 01
Page 12
From what we have just learned of the animals and plants living in Europe during this age, we can frame some conception of the different climatic conditions of Europe. On the one hand, we have a country with a mild and genial climate. Trees of a warm latitude were then growing as far north as Paris, and we may well suppose Europe to have abounded in shady forests and grassy plains, through which flowed large rivers. It was just such a country as that in which elephants and southern animals would flourish, while vast herds of deer and bovine animals wandered over the entire length and breadth of the land. Where animal life was so abundant there were sure to be carnivorous animals also, and lions, hyenas, tigers, and other animals added to the variety of animal life.
In her foreign wars Carthage depended upon mercenary troops, which her great wealth enabled her to procure in abundance from Spain, Italy, and Greece, as well as from Libya. Sardinia and Corsica were among her earliest conquests, and Sicily was also one of the first objects of her military enterprise. The Phoenician colonies in this island came under her dominion as the power of Tyre declined; and having thus obtained a firm footing in Sicily, she carried on a long struggle for the supremacy with the Greek cities. It was here that she came into contact with the Roman arms. The relations of Rome and Carthage had hitherto been peaceful, and a treaty, concluded between the two states in the first years of the Roman republic, had been renewed more than once. But the extension of Roman dominion had excited the jealousy of Carthage, and Rome began to turn longing eyes to the fair island at the foot of her empire. It was evident that a struggle was not far distant, and Pyrrhus could not help exclaiming, as he quitted Sicily, "How fine a battle-field are we leaving to the Romans and Carthaginians!"
Inquiring, then, what are the essentials, the presence of which constitutes language, while their absence negatives it altogether, we find that Professor Max Muller restricts them to the use of grammatical articulate words that we can write or speak, and denies that anything can be called language unless it can be written or spoken in articulate words and sentences. He also denies that we can think at all unless we do so in words; that is to say, in sentences with verbs and nouns. Indeed he goes so far as to say upon his title-page that there can be no reason--which I imagine comes to much the same thing as thought--without language, and no language without reason.
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