In this sense, it may be said that language is not the work of man, since it is not the work of his mind.

Further, the mechanism of language seems more wonderful and ingenious when it is not regarded as the result of reflection.

This fact is one of the most curious and indisputable which philology has observed.

See, among other works, a Latin essay by F.G.
Bergmann (Strasbourg, 1839), in which the learned author explains how the phonetic germ is born of sensation; how language passes through three successive stages of development; why man, endowed at birth with the instinctive faculty of creating a language, loses this faculty as fast as his mind develops; and that the study of languages is real natural history,--in fact, a science.

France possesses to-day several philologists of the first rank, endowed with rare talents and deep philosophic insight,--modest savants developing a science almost without the knowledge of the public; devoting themselves to studies which are scornfully looked down upon, and seeming to shun applause as much as others seek it." All that he does from instinct man despises; or, if he admires it, it is as Nature's work, not as his own.