[…] the science of language, or linguistic science. That science strives to comprehend language, both in its unity, as a means of human expression and as distinguished from brute communication, and in its internal variety, of material and structure. It seeks to discover the cause of the resemblances and differences of languages, and to effect a classification of them, by tracing out the lines of resemblance, and drawing the limits of difference. It seeks to determine what language is in relation to thought, and how it came to sustain this relation; what keeps up its life and what has kept it in existence in past time, and even, if possible, how it came into existence at all. It seeks to know what language is worth to the mind, and what has been its part in the development of our race. And, less directly, it seeks to learn and set forth what it may of the history of human development, and of the history of races, their movements and connections, so far as these are to be read in the facts of language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.4

As a general conclusion, the incompetence of linguistic science to pass any decisive judgement as to the unity or diversity of the human races, or even as to that of human speech, appears to be completely and irrevocably demonstrated.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.270

That view of the nature of language which linguistic science establishes takes entirely away the foundation on which the doctrine of divine origin, in its form as once held, reposed.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.303