This chapter seeks to capture the moment at the turn of the twentieth century when a Chinese historicist met a British evolutionist in language. From the 1890s onward there was a burgeoning call for language reform among the Chinese pioneers. In order to counterbalance the appeal of alphabetic writing, Zhang Binglin serialized the Chinese translation of Herbert Spencer’s “Progress: Its Law and Cause” in the reformist journal Free Expression (Changyan bao 昌言報) in 1898. Inspired by the British theorist’s idea that progress means “a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous,” Zhang Binglin attempted in the translation to trace the uninterrupted development of the Chinese language. He identified the expression of feelings as the origin of language, placed the Western grammatical framework into traditional Chinese terminology, and, above all, looked for the common “ancestral words” that supposedly sustained the development of the classical Chinese language. Spencer’s imprint upon Zhang Binglin was such that it persisted in Zhang’s exploration of the origin of Chinese through his later enterprises, both cultural and political. Altogether, it showcases how the discourse of evolutionism was borrowed and bifurcated toward the making of modernity in China.