‘... dehinc Gnatia lymphis
Iratis exstructa dedit risusque jocosque;
Dum flamma sine thura liquescere limine sacro,
Persuadere cupit: credat Judæus Apella;
Non ego.’[[246]]
Thus ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction, may at times find means to make stupid and evil superstitions bear witness against themselves.
Moreover, in working to gain an insight into the general laws of intellectual movement, there is practical gain in being able to study them rather among antiquarian relics of no intense modern interest, than among those seething problems of the day on which action has to be taken amid ferment and sharp strife. Should some moralist or politician speak contemptuously of the vanity of studying matters without practical moment, it will generally be found that his own mode of treatment will consist in partizan diatribes on the questions of the day, a proceeding practical enough, especially in confirming those who agree with him already, but the extreme opposite to the scientific way of eliciting truth. The ethnographer’s course, again, should be like that of the anatomist who carries on his studies if possible rather on dead than on living subjects; vivisection is nervous work, and the humane investigator hates inflicting needless pain. Thus when the student of culture occupies himself in viewing the bearings of exploded controversies, or in unravelling the history of long-superseded inventions, he is gladly seeking his evidence rather in such dead old history, than in the discussions where he and those he lives among are alive with intense party feeling, and where his judgment is biassed by the pressure of personal sympathy, and even it may be of personal gain or loss. So, from things which perhaps never were of high importance, things which have fallen out of popular significance, or even out of popular memory, he tries to elicit general laws of culture, often to be thus more easily and fully gained than in the arena of modern philosophy and politics.
But the opinions drawn from old or worn-out culture are not to be left lying where they were shaped. It is no more reasonable to suppose the laws of mind differently constituted in Australia and in England, in the time of the cave-dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet-iron houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical combination were of one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and are of another now. The thing that has been will be; and we are to study savages and old nations to learn the laws that under new circumstances are working for good or ill in our own development. If it is needful to give an instance of the directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon our modern life, let it be taken in the facts just brought forward on the relation of ancient sorcery to the belief in witchcraft which was not long since one of the gravest facts of European history, and of savage spiritualism to beliefs which so deeply affect our civilization now. No one who can see in these cases, and in many others to be brought before him in these volumes, how direct and close the connexion may be between modern culture and the condition of the rudest savage, will be prone to accuse students who spend their labour on even the lowest and most trifling facts of ethnography, of wasting their hours in the satisfaction of a frivolous curiosity.
CHAPTER V.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.
Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by independent correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent processes of Language—Gesture—Expression of feature, &c.—Emotional Tone—Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and pitch, consonants—Emphasis and Accent—Phrase-melody, Recitative—Sound-Words—Interjections—Calls to Animals—Emotional Cries—Sense-Words formed from Interjections—Affirmative and Negative particles, &c.