"If, however, language is the human [Greek: kat ezochhên], the suggestion arises whether it should not form the basis of any scientific systematic arrangement of mankind; whether the foundation of the natural classification of the genus Homo has not been discovered in it.
"How little constant are cranial peculiarities and other so-called race characters! Language, on the other hand, is always a perfectly constant diagnostic. A German may occasionally compete in hair and prognathism with a negro, but a negro language will never be his mother tongue. Of how little importance for mankind the so-called race characters are, is shown by the fact that speakers of languages belonging to one and the same linguistic family may exhibit the peculiarities of various races. Thus the settled Osmanli Turk exhibits Caucasian characters, while other so-called Tartaric Turks exemplify the Mongol type. On the other hand, the Magyar and the Basque do not depart in any essential physical peculiarity from the Indo-Germans, whilst the Magyar, Basque, and Indo-Germanic tongues are widely different. Apart from their inconstancy, again, the so-called race characters can hardly yield a scientifically natural system. Languages, on the other hand, readily fall into a natural arrangement, like that of which other vital products are susceptible, especially when viewed from their morphological side…. The externally visible structure of the cerebral and facial skeletons, and of the body generally, is less important than that no less material but infinitely more delicate corporeal structure, the function of which is speech. I conceive, therefore, that the natural classification of languages is also the natural classification of mankind. With language, moreover, all the higher manifestations of man's vital activity are closely interwoven, so that these receive due recognition in and by that of speech."[1]
[Footnote 1: August Schleicher. Ueber die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen, pp. 16-18. Weimar, 1858.]
Without the least desire to depreciate the value of philology as an adjuvant to ethnology, I must venture to doubt, with Rudolphi, Desmoulins, Crawfurd, and others, its title to the leading position claimed for it by the writers whom I have just quoted. On the contrary, it seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock, unless philologers are prepared to demonstrate, that no nation can lose its language and acquire that of a distinct nation, without a change of blood corresponding with the change of language. Desmoulins long ago put this argument exceedingly well:—
"Let us imagine the recurrence of one of those slow, or sudden, political revolutions, or say of those secular changes which among different people and at different epochs have annihilated historical monuments and even extinguished tradition. In that case, the evidence, now so clear, that the negroes of Hayti were slaves imported by a French colony, who, by the very effect of the subordination involved in slavery, lost their own diverse languages and adopted that of their masters, would vanish. And metaphysical philosophers, observing the identity of Haytian French with that spoken on the shores of the Seine and the Loire, would argue that the men of St. Domingo with woolly heads, black and oily skins, small calves, and slightly bent knees, are of the same race, descended from the same parental stock, as the Frenchmen with silky brown, chestnut, or fair hair, and white skins. For they would say, their languages are more similar than French is to German or Spanish."[1]
[Footnote 1: Desmoulins, "Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines," p. 345. 1826.]
It must not be imagined that the case put by Desmoulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events precisely similar to the transport of a body of Africans to the West India Islands, indeed, cannot have happened among uncivilized races, but similar results have followed the importation of bodies of conquerors among an enslaved people over and over again. There is hardly a country in Europe in which two or more nations speaking widely different tongues have not become intermixed; and there is hardly a language of Europe of which we have any right to think that its structure affords a just indication of the amount of that intermixture.
As Dr. Latham has well said:—
"It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are unimportant. It is by no means so certain that the blood of Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast amount of Kelticism, not found in our tongue, very probably exists in our pedigrees. The ethnology of France is still more complicated. Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the strength of his language; whilst others make him a Kelt on the strength of certain moral characteristics, combined with the previous Kelticism of the original Gauls. Spanish and Portuguese, as languages, are derivations from the Latin; Spain and Portugal, as countries, are Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab, in different proportions. Italian is modern Latin all the world over; yet surely there must be much Keltic blood in Lombardy, and much Etruscan intermixture in Tuscany.
"In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the
Niemen spoke some Slavonic dialect; they now nearly all speak
German. Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic than the
speech."[1]