Its present procedure is in the main analytic or formal.

Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply by contrasting the different ways in which words are affected by being put together into a sentence.

No attempt is made to show that one type of arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is in any way more rudimentary--that is to say, less adapted to the needs of human intercourse.

It is not even pretended that a given language is bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; though the process known as analogy--that is, the regularizing of exceptions by treating the unlike as if it were like--will always be apt to establish one system at the expense of the rest.
If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminence amongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction must be given to its inquiries.

And there is much to be said for any change that would bring about this result.