Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

“Who shows a Newton as he shows an ape.”

Yet, provided there be no morbid gloating over the more dishonourable points of similarity, no pleasurable excitement derived from the lowering view of our nature, the study is not ignoble. At any rate, it is part of human knowledge, and a step in the direction of self-knowledge.

Besides this, the relationship is merely one of degree. We may not be either improperly or unpleasantly like the orang-utan or the chimpanzee. We may even be angelomorphic. Nevertheless, we are more like orang-utans and chimpanzees than aught else upon earth.

The other branch of Man’s Natural History is called Ethnology—from the Greek word signifying nation (ethnos).

It by no means follows, that because there is an anthropology there is an ethnology also. There is no ethnology where there is but a single pair to the species. There would be no ethnology if all the world were negroes; none if every man was a Chinese; none if there were naught but Englishmen. The absolute catholicity of a religion without sects, the centralized uniformity of a universal empire, are types and parallels to an anthropology without an ethnology. This is because Ethnology deals with Man in respect to his Varieties.

There would be an anthropology if but one single variety of mankind existed.

But if one variety of mankind—and no more—existed, there would be no ethnology. It would be as impossible a science as a polity on Robinson Crusoe’s island.

But let there be but a single sample of different though similar bodily conformation. Let there be a white as well as a black, or a black as well as a white man. In that case ethnology begins; even as a polity began on Crusoe’s island when his servant Friday became a denizen of it.

The other classes of organized beings, although, mutatis mutandis, they have, of necessity, their equivalent to an anthropology, may or may not have an ethnology. The dog has one; the chimpanzee has either none or an insignificant one; differences equivalent to those which separate the cur from the greyhound, or the shepherd’s-dog from the pointer, being wanting. Again, a treatise which showed how the chimpanzee differed from the orang-utan on one side, and man on the other, would be longer than a dissertation upon the extent to which chimpanzees differed from each other; yet a dissertation on the varieties of dogs would be bulkier than one on their relations to the fox. This shows how the proportions of the two studies may vary with the species under consideration. In the Natural History of Man, the ethnological aspect is the most varied. It is also the one which has been most studied. With the horse, or the sheep, with many of the domestic fowls, with the more widely-cultivated plants, the study of the variety outweighs that of the species. With the dog it does so in an unparalleled degree. But what if the dog-tribe had the use of language? what if the language differed with each variety? In such a case the study of canine ethnology would be doubly and trebly complex, though at the same time the data for conducting it would be both increased and improved. A distant—a very distant approach—to this exists. The wild dog howls; the companion of man alone barks. This is a difference of language as far as it goes. This is written to foreshadow the importance of the study of language as an instrument of ethnological investigation.