The Monosyllabic Area—the Tʻhay—the Môn and Khô—Tables—the Bʻhot—the Chinese—Burmese—Persia—India—Tamulian family—the Brahúi—the Dioscurians—the Georgians—Irôn—Mizjeji—Lesgians—Armenians—Asia Minor—Lycians—Carians—Paropamisans—Conclusion 184–250
MAN AND HIS MIGRATIONS.
[CHAPTER I.]
The Natural or Physical history of Man—the Civil—their difference—divisions of the Natural or Physical history—Anthropology—Ethnology—how far pursued by the ancients—Herodotus—how far by the moderns—Buffon—Linnæus—Daubenton—Camper—Blumenbach—the term Caucasian—Cuvier—Philology as an instrument of ethnological investigation—Pigafetta—Hervas—Leibnitz—Reland—Adelung—Klaproth—the union of Philology and of Anatomy—Prichard—its Palæontological character—influence of Lyell’s Geology—of Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences.
Let us contrast the Civil with the Natural History of Man.
The influence of individual heroes, the effect of material events, the operations of ideas, the action and reaction of the different elements of society upon each other, come within the domain of the former. An empire is consolidated, a contest concluded, a principle asserted, and the civil historian records them. He does more. If he be true to his calling, he investigates the springs of action in individual actors, measures the calibre of their moral and intellectual power, and pronounces a verdict of praise or blame upon the motives which determine their manifestation. This makes him a great moral teacher, and gives a value to his department of knowledge, which places it on a high and peculiar level.
Dealing with actions and motives, he deals nearly exclusively with those of individuals; so much so, that even where he records the movements of mighty masses of men, he generally finds that there is one presiding will which regulates and directs them; and even when this is not the case, when the movement of combined multitudes is spontaneous, the spring of action is generally of a moral nature—a dogma if religious, a theory if political.
Such a history as this could not be written of the brute animals, neither could it be written for them. No animal but Man supplies either its elements or its objects; nor yet the record which transmits the memory of past actions, even when they are of the most material kind. The civil historian, therefore, of our species, or, to speak with a conciseness which common parlance allows, the historian, living and breathing in the peculiar atmosphere of humanity, and exhibiting man in the wide circle of moral and intellectual action,—a circle in which none but he moves,—takes up his study where that of the lower animals ends. Whatever is common to them and man, belongs to the naturalist. Let each take his view of the Arab or the Jew. The one investigates the influence of the Bible and the Koran; whilst the other may ask how far the Moorish blood has mixed with that of the Spaniard, or remark the permanence of the Israelite features under climates so different as Poland, Morocco, or Hindostan. The one will think of instincts, the other of ideas.