Branch.—A portion of a race separated geographically, linguistically, or otherwise, from other portions of the race.
Stock.—A portion of a branch united by some prominent trait, especially language, offering presumptive evidence of demonstrable relationship. The individual elements of a stock are its peoples.
A group consists of a number of these peoples who are connected together by a closer tie, geographical, linguistic, or physical, than that which unites the members of the stock.
A tribe is a body of men collected under one government. They are presumably of the same race and dialect.
A nation, on the other hand, is a body of men under one government, frequently of different languages and races. Its members have no presumed relationship further than that they belong to the same species.
There are some other terms the precise meaning of which should be defined before we proceed, the more so as there is not that uniformity in their use among ethnographers which were desirable.
This very word ethnos, with its adjective ethnic, is an example. What is an ethnos? I know no better word for it in English than a people, as I have already explained this word,—one of the elements of a stock all whose members, there is reason to believe, have a demonstrable relationship. Thus we should speak of the Aryan stock, made up of the Latin, Greek, Celtic and other peoples. The relationship among the members of a people is closer than that between the members of a stock. People corresponds to the Old English folk (German Volk), but folk in the modern English scientific terms “folk-lore,” “folk-medicine,” has acquired a different signification.
Culture and civilization are other terms not always correctly employed. The former is the broader, the generic word. All forms of human society show more or less culture; but civilization is a certain stage of culture, and a rather high one, when men unite under settled governments to form a state or commonwealth (civitas) with acknowledged individual rights (civis). This presupposes a knowledge of various arts and developed mental powers.
Much attention was paid by older writers to dividing the progress of culture into a number of stages or stadia. One of these, an American author, Lewis H. Morgan, suggested an elaborate scheme according to which the periods of man’s development should correspond with historical conditions of culture, and these he divided into lower, middle and upper states of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, each characterized by the introduction of some new art.
The problem is far too complicated to admit of any such mechanical solution. The possession of a given art, as the bow and arrow, or smelting iron, does not lift a people, nor is it an indication of their culture. Peoples low in one point are high in others; they develop along different lines, with scarcely a common measure, and their place in a general scheme must be determined by an exhaustive investigation of all their powers and conquests, and perhaps a comparison with some other standards than those which we have been brought up to consider the best.