We have seen that in its beginning the science of man was little more than a branch of zoology, and that his structural characters were the first to attract attention and to form the material of study; hence all the earlier classifications were based on physical features. Gallatin was one of the first to classify mankind rather by what they do than by what they are.
Gallatin.
Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) was born at Geneva, emigrated to America before he was twenty, and rose rapidly to the position of one of the foremost of American statesmen, becoming United States Minister to France, and later to England. He noted the unsatisfactoriness of groupings by colour, stature, head-form, etc., in the case of the races of America, and made a preliminary classification of the native tribes on the basis of language. Major J. W. Powell (1834-1902) and Dr. Brinton (1837-1899) elaborated the linguistic classification of the American Indians.
Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Classification by language had already been utilised by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java, entitled Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, which was published posthumously, 1836-40. The rise of the new science of philology gave a fresh impetus to this method of classification, which was adopted by F. Müller (1834-1898), and utilised recently by Deniker and various other writers.
Other classifications, by means of cultural distinctions, have been attempted. Among these may be noted that based on mythology and religion of Max Müller, on institutions and social organisation of Morgan and Ratzel, or on musical systems of Fétis.
Hippocrates.
Hippocrates (c. 460-377), in his work, About Air, Water, and Places, first discusses the influence of environment on man, physical, moral, and pathological. He divided mankind into groups, impressed with homogeneous characters by homogeneous surroundings, demonstrating that mountains, plains, damp, aridity, and so on, produced definite and varying types.
Bodin.
Bodin, writing in 1577 Of the Lawes and Customes of a Common Wealth (English edition, 1605), contains, as Professor J. L. Myres has pointed out,[[128]] “the whole pith and kernel of modern anthropo-geography.... His climatic contrasts are based on the Ptolemaic geography ... and he argues as if the world broke off short at Sahara.... On his classification of environments from arctic North to tropic South” he superposes “a cross-division by grades of culture from civil East to barbaric West.”