Darwinian evolution was not the only 19th century development that marked an aroused interest in process, change, and origins. Philology, too, began to stress historical usage, examining ancient texts the same way the life sciences were studying fossils and sedimentary layers. The idealizing, a priori forms of the eighteenth century linguistic study were gradually left behind in favor of new emphasis on messy actuality, on historical contingency, development, and the "life stories" of words. The dictionary editor was suddenly more akin to an astronomer, a zoologist, or a botanist than to a philosopher.
R. C. Trench, 1851 lecture for the London Philological Society:
> You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary…to conclude the successive physical changes through which a region has passed….Now with such a composite language as the English before us, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish, Norman…
(And as one could track cartographic plagiarists through the transmission of paper towns, so could one track factual or scientific errors...)
And William Dwight Whitney, fifteen years later, would echo Trench: "The remains of ancient speech are like strata deposited in bygone ages, telling of the forms of life then existing…while words are as rolled pebbles, relics of yet more ancient formations, or as fossils, whose grade indicates the progress of organic life…," as a London Times journalist in 1915 would remark that the history of ideas could be traced "curious accuracy by the appearance of the new words in which they are embodied. For just as the archæologist, when he excavates the site of some ancient city, finds the various forms of its civilization arranged in chronological strata, so we find evidences of each past generation and its activities in the superimposed strata of our vocabulary." Language was a medium like amber, preserving insect genetics (although the concept was still forthcoming, Mendel not yet, in 1851 discovered, and Darwin still brooding on some proto-evolution, and William Bateson's coinage, under whose partial shadow young Gregory would grow, half a century in waiting).
Kenner himself could not help but pick up on these precedents to his modernists, language as "petrified poem," quoting the transcendentalist Emerson, and making "fossil poetry" a "thing" (a process akin to magic, the word made real, as Hubert Dreyfus tells us of the Californian ethos of "laid back"):
> The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.