Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

I cannot affiliate either of these sayings; though I hold strongly with both. They must prepare us for a new term—the philological school of ethnology, the philological principle of classification, the philological test. The worst that can be said of this is that it was isolated. The philologists began work independently of the anatomists, and the anatomists independently of the philologists. And so, with one great exception, they have kept on.

Pigafetta, one of the circumnavigators with Magalhaens, was the first who collected specimens of the unlettered dialects of the countries that afforded opportunities.

The Abbé Hervas in the 17th century, published his Catalogue of Tongues, and Arithmetic of Nations, parts of a large and remarkable work, the Saggio del Universo. His data he collected by means of an almost unlimited correspondence with the Jesuit missionaries of the Propaganda.

The all-embracing mind of Leibnitz had not only applied itself to philology, but had clearly seen its bearing upon history. A paper on the Basque language is a sample of the ethnology of the inventor of Fluxions.

Reland wrote on the wide distribution of the Malay tongue; criticised certain vocabularies from the South-Sea Islands of Hoorn, Egmont, Ticopia (then called Cocos Island), and Solomon’s Archipelago, and gave publicity to a fact which even now is mysterious—the existence of Malay words in the language of Madagascar.

In 1801 Adelung’s Mithridates appeared, containing specimens of all the known languages of the world; a work as classical to the comparative philologist as Blackstone’s Commentaries are to the English lawyer. Vater’s Supplement (1821) is a supplement to Adelung; Jülg’s (1845) to Vater’s.

Klaproth’s is the other great classic in this department. His Asia Polyglotta and Sprachatlas give us the classification of all the families of Asia, according to the vocabularies representing their languages. Whether a comparison between their different grammars would do the same is doubtful; since it by no means follows that the evidence of the two coincides.

Klaproth and Adelung have the same prominence in philological that Buffon and Blumenbach have in zoological ethnology.

Blumenbach appreciated the philological method: but the first who combined the two was Dr. Prichard. His profession gave him the necessary physiology; and that he was a philologist amongst philologists is shown not only by numerous details scattered throughout his writings, but by his ‘Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations’—the most definite and desiderated addition that has been made to ethnographical philology. I say nothing about the details of Dr. Prichard’s great work. Let those who doubt its value try to do without it.