[…] it is evident in what sense alone there can be a science of morphology, or of the adaptations and readaptations of articulate signs to the uses and changes of thought. As implying the existence of necessary laws of significant development, which are to be traced out and made to explain the phenomena underlain by them, no such science is possible; as classifying and arranging the infinite variety of actual facts, and pointing out the directions in which the movement takes place more than in others, it has a most useful work to do.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.144