As I look upon language neither as a ready-made gift of God nor as a natural growth of the human mind, but as, in the true sense of the word, a work of human art, I must confess that nothing has surprised me so much as the high art displayed in the languages of so-called savages. I do not wish to exaggerate; and I know quite well that a great abundance of grammatical forms, such as we find in these savage dialects, is by no means a proof of high intellectual development. But if we consider how small is the number of words and ideas in the ordinary vocabulary of an English peasant,[18] and if then we find that one dialect of the Fuegians, the Tagan, consists of about 30,000 words,[19] we certainly hesitate before venturing to classify the possessors of so vast an inherited wealth as the descendants of poor savages, more savage than themselves. Such facts cannot be argued away. We cannot prevent people from despising religious concepts different from their own, or from laughing at customs which they themselves could never adopt. But such a treasure of conceptual thought as is implied in the possession of a vocabulary of 30,000 entries cannot be ignored in our estimate of the antecedents of this Fuegian race. I select the Fuegians as a crucial test simply because Darwin[20] selected them as the strongest proof of his own theory, and placed them almost below the level reached by the most intelligent animals. I have always had a true regard for Darwin, and what I admired in him more than anything else was his fearlessness, his simple devotion to truth. I believe that if he had seen that his own theories were wrong, he would have been the first to declare it, whatever his followers might have said. But in spite of all that, no man can resist the influence of his own convictions. When Darwin looked at the Fuegians, he no doubt saw what he tells us, but then he saw it with Darwinian eyes. According to his account, the party of Fuegians whom he saw resembled the devils which come on the stage in such plays as Der Freischütz.[21] “Viewing such men, one can hardly believe,” he says, “that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world” (p. 235). “Their language, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat, but certainly no European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse, guttural, and clicking sounds.”
Now, even with regard to their physical aspect, Darwin must have either been very unlucky in the Fuegians whom he met, or he cannot have kept himself quite free from prejudice. Captain Parker Snow, in his Two Years Cruise of Tierra del Fuego (London 1857), speaks of them as without the least exaggeration really beautiful representatives of the human race. Professor Virchow, when exhibiting a number of Fuegians at Berlin, strongly protested against the supposition of the Fuegians being by nature an inferior race, so that they might be considered as a connecting link between ape and man. But what shall we say of Darwin's estimate of the Fuegian language? Here we can judge for ourselves, and I doubt whether, so far as this sound is concerned, anyone would consider Fuegian as inferior to English. Giacomo Bove, when speaking of the Tagan dialect, says, “le parole di quella sono dolci, piacevoli, piene di vocali.” And though he admits that some of the other dialects are harsher, yet that is very far as yet from the sound of clearing the throat.
And, even if the sound of their language was as guttural as some of the Swiss dialects, how shall we account for the wealth of their vocabulary? Every concept embodied in their language is the result of hard intellectual labor; and although here again excessive wealth may be an embarrassment, yet there remains enough to prove a past that must have been very different from the present.
The workman must at least have been as great as his work; and if the ruins of Central America tell us of architects greater than any that country could produce at present, the magnificent ruins in the dialects, whether of Fuegians, Mohawks, or Hottentots, tell us of mental builders whom no one could match at present. Even in their religious beliefs there are here and there rays of truth which could never have proceeded from the dark night of their actual superstitions. The Fuegians, according to Captain FitzRoy, believe in a just god and a great spirit moving about in forests and mountains. They may believe in a great deal more, but people who believe in a great spirit in forests and mountains, and in a just god, are not on the lowest step of the ladder leading from earth to heaven.
The Duke of Argyll, in examining the principal races that are commonly called savage, has pointed out that degraded races generally inhabit the extreme ends of continents or tracts of country almost unfit for human habitation, or again whole islands difficult of access except under exceptionally favorable conditions. He naturally concludes that they did not go there of their own free will, but that they represent conquered races, exiles, weaklings, cowards, criminals, who saved nothing but their life in their flight before more vigorous conquerors, or in their exile from countries that had thrown them off like poison. Instead of looking on the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego as children of the soil, Autochthones, or the immediate descendants of the mythical Proanthropoi, the Duke points out that it is far more likely they may have come from the north; that their ancestors may have participated in the blessings of the soil and climate of Chili, Peru, Brazil, or Mexico, possibly in the early civilisation of that part of the world; and that the wretchedness of the country into which they were driven fully accounts for their present degradation. Take away the wretchedness of their present home, educate a baby, as Captain FitzRoy did, under the beneficent influences of an English sky and of European civilisation, and in one generation, as Mr. Darwin tells us, “his intellect was good, and his disposition nice.”
It is quite fair that those who oppose this theory should call upon the Duke to establish his view by the evidence of language. If the Fuegians were the descendants of the same race which reached a high pitch of civilisation in Peru, Mexico, or Central America, their language ought to show the irrefragable proof of such descent. If it did, his position would be impregnable. Unfortunately the materials now at hand have not yet been sufficiently examined to enable us to say either yes or no. Nor must we forget that language, when it is not fixed by a popular literature, is liable among nomadic tribes to unlimited variation. The number of languages spoken[22] throughout the whole of North and South America has been estimated to considerably exceed twelve hundred; and on the northern continent alone more than five hundred distinct languages are said to be spoken, which admit of classification among seventy-five ethnical groups, each with essential linguistic distinctions, pointing to its own parent stock. Some of these languages are merely well-marked dialects, with fully developed vocabularies. Others have more recently acquired a dialectic character in the breaking up and scattering of dismembered tribes, and present a very limited range of vocabulary, suited to the intellectual requirements of a small tribe or band of nomads. The prevailing condition of life throughout the whole North American continent was peculiarly favorable to the multiplication of such dialects and their growth into new languages, owing to the constant breaking up and scattering of tribes, and the frequent adoption into their numbers of the refugees from other fugitive broken tribes, leading to an intermingling of vocabularies and fresh modifications of speech. It is to be hoped that the study of native American languages may before long receive that attention which it so fully deserves. It must be taken up in good earnest, and with all the accuracy which we are accustomed to in a comparative study of Indo-European languages. All ethnological questions must for the present be kept in abeyance till the linguistic witness can be brought into court, and it would be extraordinary if the laurels that can here be gained should fail to stimulate the ambition of some young scholar in America.
As to the Fuegians at Cape Horn, so at the North Pole the Eskimos, however low their present state of civilisation, have been looked upon as immigrants from a centre of civilisation located in a more temperate zone. The Eskimo leads the only life that is possible in his latitudes. Why he should have migrated there, unless driven by force majeure, is impossible to say. Unless we are willing to admit a special Eskimo Adam, we have no choice except to look upon him either as a withering offshoot of the American moundbuilders, or as a weak descendant of Siberian nomads.
In Africa, the most degraded races, the Bushmen, are clearly a corruption of the Hottentots, while it is well known that some eminent ethnologists look upon the Hottentots as degraded emigrants from Egypt. How much higher the civilisation of Africa stood in former ages, we know from the monuments of Egypt and Nubia, from the histories of Phœnicia, Carthage, and Numidia. If among the ruins of these ancient centres of civilisation we now find tribes whom European travellers would call savage, we see again that in the evolution of man retrogression is as important an element as progression.
Even in Australasia, where we meet with the most repulsive customs and the most hopeless barbarism, the Duke of Argyll shows that, according to the principles of evolution, the separation of the islands from the Asiatic continent would date from a period anterior to the age of man, and that here too man must be an immigrant, a degraded offshoot from that branch of the human race which in China or India has risen to some kind of civilised life. For further details the pages in the last book of the Duke of Argyll, particularly chapter x., on the “Degradation of Man,” should be consulted. It must suffice here to quote his summing up:—
Instead of assuming these (savage) tribes to be the nearest living representatives of primeval man, we should be more safe in assuming them to represent the widest departure from that earliest condition of our race which, on the theory of development, must of necessity have been associated at first with the most highly favorable conditions of external nature.