  It is tempting to see Crummell's philosophy of language in terms of Humboldt's work in the decades prior on comparative grammars rather than Locke's empiricist semantics. Humboldt compared linguistic varieties in order to discover patterns across those variations, the idea being that linguistic universals occur throughout human experience, if only we can capture the common patterns. Crummell can thus be read as Humboldtian, albeit an illiberal and intolerant one. That may turn out to be a productive reading, but little historical evidence has yet been uncovered to show that Crummell knew of Humboldt.