The Project Gutenberg eBook, Man and His Migrations, by R. G. (Robert Gordon) Latham

Transcriber’s Note

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MAN AND HIS MIGRATIONS.

BY
R. G. LATHAM, M.D., F.R.S.,

CORRESPONDING MEMBER TO THE ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, NEW YORK,
ETC. ETC.

LONDON:
JOHN VAN VOORST, PATERNOSTER ROW.

MDCCCLI.

PRINTED BY RICHARD TAYLOR,
RED LION COURT, FLEET STREET.

PREFACE.

The following pages represent a Course of Six Lectures delivered at the Mechanics’ Institution, Liverpool, in the month of March of the present year; the matter being now laid before the public in a somewhat fuller and more systematic form than was compatible with the original delivery.

[CONTENTS.]

[CHAPTER I.] Page

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 1–36

[CHAPTER II.]

Ethnology—its objects—the chief problems connected with it—prospective questions—transfer of populations—Extract from Knox—correlation of certain parts of the body to certain external influences—parts less subject to such influences—retrospective questions—the unity or non-unity of our species—opinions—plurality of species—multiplicity of protoplasts—doctrine of development—Dokkos—Extract—antiquity of our species—its geographical origin—the term race 37–66

[CHAPTER III.]

Methods—the science one of observation and deduction rather than experiment—classification—on mineralogical, on zoological principles—the first for Anthropology, the second for Ethnology—value of Language as a test—instances of its loss—of its retention—when it proves original relation, when intercourse—the grammatical and glossarial tests—classifications must be real—the distribution of Man—size of [area]—ethnological contrasts in close geographical contact—discontinuity and isolation of areas—oceanic migrations 67–100

[CHAPTER IV.]

Details of distribution—their conventional character—convergence from the circumference to the centre—Fuegians; Patagonian, Pampa, and Chaco Indians—Peruvians—D’Orbigny’s characters—other South American Indians—of the Missions—of Guiana—of Venezuela—Guarani—Caribs—Central America—Mexican civilization no isolated phænomenon—North American Indians—Eskimo—apparent objections to their connection with the Americans and Asiatics—Tasmanians—Australians—Papuás—Polynesians—Micronesians—Malagasi—Hottentots—Kaffres—Negroes—Berbers—Abyssinians—Copts—the Semitic family—Primary and secondary migrations 101–157

[CHAPTER V.]

The Ugrians of Lapland, Finland, Permia, the Ural Mountains and the Volga—area of the light-haired families—Turanians—the Kelts of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Gaul—the Goths—the Sarmatians—the Greeks and Latins—difficulties of European ethnology—displacement—intermixture—identification of ancient families—extinction of ancient families—the Etruscans—the Pelasgi—isolation—the Basks—the Albanians—classifications and hypotheses—the term Indo-European—the Finnic hypothesis 158–183

[CHAPTER VI.]

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.

In what part of the world did this originate? How was it diffused over the surface of the earth? At what period in the world’s history was it evolved? Where does it thrive best? Where does it cease to thrive at all? What forms does it take if it degenerate? What conditions of soil or climate determine such degenerations? What favour its improvement? Can it exist in Nova Zembla? In Africa? In either region or both? Do the long nights of the Pole blanch, does the bright glare of the Equator deepen its colour? &c. Instead of multiplying questions of this kind, I will ask to what they apply. They apply to every being that multiplies its kind upon earth; to every animal of the land or sea; to every vegetable as well; to every organized being. They apply to the ape, the horse, the dog, the fowl, the fish, the insect, the fruit, the flower. They apply to these—and they apply to man as well. They—and the like of them—Legion by name—common alike to the lords and the lower orders of the creation, constitute the natural history of genus Homo; and I use the language of the Zoologist for the sake of exhibiting in a prominent and palpable manner, the truly zoological character of this department of science. Man as an animal is the motto here; whilst Man as a moral being is the motto with the Historian.

It is not very important whether we call this Natural or Physical History. There are good authorities on both sides. It is only important to see how it differs from the History of the Historian.

Man’s Civil history has its divisions. Man’s Natural history has them also.

The first of these takes its name from the Greek words for man (anthrôpos) and doctrine (logos), and is known as Anthropology.

When the first pair of human beings stood alone on the face of the earth, there were then the materials for Anthropology; and so there would be if our species were reduced to the last man. There would be an Anthropology if the world had no inhabitants but Englishmen, or none but Chinese; none but red men of America, or none but blacks of Africa. Were the uniformity of feature, the identity of colour, the equality of stature, the rivalry of mental capacity ever so great, there would still be an Anthropology. This is because Anthropology deals with Man as compared with the lower animals.

We consider the structure of the human extremities, and enlarge upon the flatness of the foot, and the flexibility of the hand. The one is subservient to the erect posture, the other to the innumerable manipulations which human industry demands. We compare them with the fins of fishes, the wings of birds; in doing which, we take the most extreme contrasts we can find. But we may also take nearer approximations, e.g. the hands of the higher apes. Here we find likeness as well as difference; difference as well as likeness. We investigate both; and record the result either in detail or by some general expression. Perhaps we pronounce that the one side gives the conditions of an arboreal life, the other those of a social state; the ape being the denizen of the woods, the man of towns and cities; the one a climber, the other a walker.

Or we compare the skull of the man and the chimpanzee; noticing that the ridges and prominences of the external surface, which in the former are merely rudimentary, become strongly-marked crests in the latter. We then remember that the one is the framework for the muscles of the face; the other is the case for the brain.

All that is done in this way is Anthropology.

Every class of organized beings has, mutatis mutandis, its anthropological aspect; so that the dog may be contemplated in respect to the fox which equals, the ape which excels, or the kangaroo which falls short of it in its approach to a certain standard of organization; in other words, as species and genera have their relative places in the ladder of creation, the investigation of such relations is co-extensive with the existence of the classes and groups on which it rests.

Anthropology deals too much with such matters as these to be popular. Unless the subject be handled with excessive delicacy, there is something revolting to fastidious minds in the cool contemplation of the differentiæ of the Zoologist

“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.

Again—what if the dog-tribe were possessed of the practice of certain human arts, and if these varied with the variety? If they buried their dead? and their tombs varied with the variety? if those of one generation lasted for years, decenniums, or centuries? The ethnology would again increase in complexity, and the data would again be increased. The graves of an earlier generation would serve as unwritten records of the habits of sepulture with an earlier one. This is written to foreshadow the importance of the study of antiquities as an instrument of the same kind with philology.

With dogs there are impossibilities. True; but they serve as illustrations. With man they are realities—realities which make philology and archæology important adjuncts to his natural history.

We have now ascertained the character of the study in question; and seen how far it differs from history properly so-called—at least we have done so sufficiently for the purpose of definition. A little reflection will show its relations to certain branches of science, e.g. to physiology, and mental science—a relation upon which there is no time to enlarge. It is enough to understand the existence of such a separate substantive branch of knowledge and inquiry.

What is the amount of this knowledge? This is proportionate to that of the inquiry. What has this been? Less than we are prepared to expect.

“The proper study of mankind is Man.”

This is a stock quotation on the subject.

“Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.”

This is another. Like many apophthegms of the same kind, they have more currency than influence, and are better known than acted on. We know the zoology of nine species out of ten amongst the lower animals better than that of our own genus. So little have the importance and the investigation of a really interesting subject been commensurate.

It is a new science—so new as scarcely to have reached the period of adolescence. Let us ask what the ancients cared about it.

We do not look for systematic science in the Scriptures; and the ethnology which we derive from them consists wholly of incidental notices. These, though numerous, are brief. They apply, too, to but a small portion of the earth’s surface. That, however, is one of pre-eminent interest—the cradle of civilization, and the point where the Asiatic, African, and European families come in contact.

Greece helps us more: yet Greece but little. The genius of Thucydides gave so definite a character to history, brought it so exclusively in contact with moral and political, in opposition to physical, phænomena, and so thoroughly made it the study of the statesman rather than of the zoologist, that what may be called the naturalist element, excluded at the present time, was excluded more than 2000 years ago. How widely different this from the slightly earlier Herodotean record—the form and spirit of which lived and died with the great father of historic narrative! The history of the Peloponnesian war set this kind of writing aside for ever, and the loss of what the earlier prototype might have been developed into, is a great item in the price which posterity has to pay for the κτῆμα εἰς ἀεὶ of the Athenian. As it is, however, the nine books of Herodotus form the most ethnological work not written by a professed and conscious ethnologist. Herodotus was an unconscious and instinctive one; and his ethnology was of a sufficiently comprehensive character. Manners he noted, and physical appearance he noted, and language he noted; his Scythian, Median, Ægyptian, and other glosses having the same value in the eyes of the closet philologist of the present century, as the rarer fossils of some old formation have with the geologist, or venerable coins with the numismatic archæologist. Let his name be always mentioned with reverence; for the disrespectful manner in which his testimony has been treated by some recent writers impugns nothing but the scholarship of the cavillers.

I do not say that there are no ethnological facts—it may be that we occasionally find ethnological theories—in the Greek writers subsequent; I only state that they by no means answer the expectations raised by the names of the authors, and the opportunities afforded by the nature of their subjects. Something is found in Hippocrates in the way of theory as to the effect of external condition, something in Aristotle, something in Plato—nothing, however, by which we find the study of Man as an animal recognized as a separate substantive branch of study. More than this—in works where the description of new populations was especially called for, and where the evidence of the writer would have been of the most unexceptionable kind, we find infinitely less than there ought to be. How little we learn of Persia from the Cyropædia, or of Armenia from the Anabasis—yet how easily might Xenophon have told us much!

Amongst the successors of Aristotle, we find none who writes a treatise περὶ βαρβάρων—yet how natural the subject, and how great the opportunities!—great, because of the commerce of the Euxine, and the institution of domestic slavery: the one conducting the merchant to the extreme Tanais, the other filling Athens with Thracians, and Asia Minor with Africans. The advantages which the Greeks of the age of Pericles neglected, are the advantages which the Brazilian Portuguese neglect at present, and which, until lately, both the English and the States-men of America neglected also. And the loss has been great. Like time and tide, ethnology waits for no man; and, even as the Indian of America disappears before the European, so did certain populations of antiquity. The process of extinction and amalgamation is as old as history; and whole families have materially altered in character since the beginning of the historical period. The present population of Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Moldavia is of recent introduction. What was the ancient? “Thracians and Getæ” is the answer. But what were they? “Germans,” says one writer; “Slavonians,” another; “an extinct race,” another. So that there is doubt and difference of opinion. Yet we know some little about them in other respects. We know their political relations; a little of their creed, and manners; the names of some of their tribes. Their place in the classification of the varieties of our species we do not know; and this is because, though the Greeks wrote the civil, they neglected the physical history of Man.

Thrace, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus—these are the areas for which the ancients might easily have left descriptions, and for which they neglected to do so; the omission being irreparable.

The opportunities of the Roman were greater than those of the Greek; and they were better used. Dissertations, distantly approaching the character of physical history, occur in even the pure historical writers of Greece, I allude more especially to the sketch of the manners and migrations of the ancient Greeks in the first, and the history of the Greek colonization of Sicily in the sixth book of Thucydides. Parallels to these re-appear in the Roman writers; and, in some cases, their proportion to the rest of the work is considerable. Sallust’s sketch of Northern Africa, Tacitus’ of Jewish history are of this sort—and, far superior to either, Cæsar’s account of Gaul and Britain.

The Germania[1] of Tacitus is the nearest approach to proper ethnology that antiquity has supplied. It is far, however, from either giving us the facts which are of the most importance, or exhibiting the method of investigation by which ethnology is most especially contrasted with history.

But the true measure of the carelessness of the Romans upon these points is to be taken by the same rule which applied to that of the Greeks; i. e. the contrast between their opportunities and their inquiry. Northern Italy, the Tyrol, Dalmatia, Pannonia, have all stood undescribed in respect to the ancient populations; yet they were all in a favourable position for description.

If the Jewish, Greek, and Roman writers give but little, the literatures derived from them give less; though, of course, there is a numerous selection of important passages to be made from the authors of the Middle Ages, as well as from the Byzantine historians. Besides which, there is the additional advantage of Greece and Rome having ceased to be the only countries thought worthy of being written about. A Gothic, a Slavonic, a Moorish history now make their appearance. Still they are but civil—not natural—histories. However, our sphere of observation increases, the members of the human family increase, and our records increase. Nevertheless, the facts for the naturalist occur but incidentally.

Of the Oriental literature I can only give my impression; and, as far as that goes, it is in favour of the Chinese statements having the most, and the Indian the least ethnological value; indeed, the former nation appears to have connected the notice of the occupant population with the notice of the area occupied, with laudable and sufficient closeness. I believe, too, that several differences of language are also carefully noted. Still, such ethnology as this supplies is an educt from the works in question, rather than their subject.

We now come to times nearer our own. For a sketch like the present, the Science begins when the classification of the Human Varieties is first attempted. Meanwhile, we must remember that America has been discovered, and that our opportunities now differ from those of the ancients not merely in degree but in kind. The field has been infinitely enlarged; and the world has become known in its extremities as well as in its middle parts. The human naturalists anterior to the times of Buffon and Linnæus are like the great men before Agamemnon. A minute literary history would doubtless put forward some names for this period; indeed for some departments of the study there are a few great ones. Still it begins with the times of Linnæus and Buffon—Buffon first in merit. That writer held that a General History of Man, as well as A Theory of the Earth, was a necessary part of his great work; and, as far as the former subject is concerned, he thought rightly. It is this, too, in which he has succeeded best. Thoroughly appreciating its importance, he saw its divisions clearly; and after eight chapters on the Growth of Man, his Decay, and his Senses, he devotes a ninth, as long as the others put together, to the consideration of the Varieties of the Human Species. “Every thing,” he now writes, “which we have hitherto advanced relates to Man as an individual. The history of the species requires a separate detail, of which the principal facts can only be derived from the varieties that are found in the inhabitants of different regions. Of these varieties, the first and most remarkable is the colour, the second the form and size, and the third the disposition. Considered in its full extent, each of these objects might afford materials for a volume[2].” No man need draw a clearer line between anthropology and ethnology than this. Of the systematic classification, which philology has so especially promoted, no signs occur in his treatise; on the other hand, his appreciation of the effects of difference in physical conditions is well-founded in substance, and definitely expressed. To this he attributes the contrast between the Negro, the American, and the African, and, as a natural result, he commits himself unequivocally to the doctrine of the unity of the species.

Linnæus took less cognizance of the species to which he belonged; the notice in the first edition of the Systema Naturæ being as follows:—

Now both Buffon and Linnæus limit their consideration of the bodily structure of man to the phænomena of colour, skin, and hair; in other words, to the so-called soft parts.

From the Greek word osteon = bone, we have the anatomical term osteology = the study of the bony skeleton.

This begins with the researches of the contemporary and helpmate of Buffon. Daubenton first drew attention to the base of the skull, and, amongst the parts thereof, to the foramen ovale most especially. Through the foramen ovale the spinal chord is continued into the brain, or—changing the expression—the brain prolonged into the spinal chord; whilst by its attachments the skull is connected with the vertebral column. The more this point of junction—the pivot on which the head turns—is in the centre of the base of the skull, the more are the conditions of the erect posture of man fulfilled; the contrary being the case if the foramen lie backward, as is the case with the ape as compared with the Negro, and, in some instances, with the Negro as compared with the European. I say in some instances, because the backward position of the foramen ovale in the Negro is by no means either definite or constant. Now the notice of the variations of the position of the foramen ovale—one of the first specimens of ethnological criticism applied to the hard parts of the human body—is connected with the name of Daubenton.

The study of the skull—for the skeleton is now dividing the attention of investigators with the skin and hair—in profile is connected with that of Camper. This brings us to his well-known facial angle. It means the extent to which the forehead retreated; sloping backwards from the root of the nose in some cases, and in others rising perpendicularly above the face.

Now the osteology of Daubenton and Camper was the osteology that Blumenbach found when he took up the subject. It was something; but not much.

In 1790, Blumenbach published his anatomical description of ten skulls—his first decade—drawn up with the special object of showing how certain varieties of mankind differed from each other in the conformation of so important an organ as the skull of a reasonable being—a being thereby distinguished and characterized.

He continued his researches; publishing at intervals similar decades, to the number of six. In 1820, he added to the last a pentad, so that the whole list amounted to sixty-five.

It was in the third decade, published A.D. 1795, that an unfortunate skull of a Georgian female made its appearance. The history of this should be given. Its owner was taken by the Russians, and having been removed to Moscow died suddenly. The body was examined by Professor Hiltenbrandt, and the skull presented to De Asch of St. Petersburg. Thence it reached the collection of Blumenbach, of which it seems to have been the gem—“universus hujus cranii habitus tam elegans et venustus, ut et tantum non semper vel indoctorum, si qui collectionem meam contemplentur, oculos eximia sua proportionis formositate feriat.” This encomium is followed by the description. Nor is this all. A plaster cast of one of the most beautiful busts of the Townley Museum was in possession of the anatomist. He compared the two; “and so closely did they agree that you might take your oath of one having belonged to the other”—“adeo istud huic respondere vides, ut illud hujus prototypo quondam inhæsisse pejerares.” Lastly, he closes with an extract from Chardin, enthusiastically laudatory of the beauty of the women of Georgia, and adds that his skull verifies the panegyric—“Respondet ceteroquin formosum istud cranium, quod sane pro canone ideali habere licet, iis quæ de summa Georgianæ gentis pulcritudine vel in vulgus nota sunt.”

At the end of the decade in question he used the epithets Mongolian, Æthiopian, and Caucasian (Caucasia varietas).

In the next (A.D. 1808), he speaks of the excessive beauty—the ideal—the normal character of his Georgian skull; and speaks of his osteological researches having established a quinary division of the Human Species; naming them—1. The Caucasian; 2. The Mongolian; 3. The Æthiopic; 4. The American; and 5. The Malay.

Such is the origin of the term Caucasian; a term which has done much harm in Ethnology; a term to which Blumenbach himself gave an undue value, and his followers a wholly false import. This will be seen within a few pages. Blumenbach’s Caucasian class contained—

• 1. Most of the Europeans.
• 2. The Georgians, Circassians, and other families of Caucasus.
• 3. The Jews, Arabs, and Syrians.

In the same year with the fourth decade of Blumenbach, John Hunter gave testimony of the value of the study of Man to Man, by a dissertation with a quotation from Akenside on the title-page—

“————— the spacious West
And all the teeming regions of the South,
Hold not a quarry, to the curious flight
Of Knowledge half so tempting or so fair,
As Man to Man.”

His tract was an Inaugural Dissertation, and I merely mention it because it was written by Hunter, and dedicated to Robertson.

Cuvier, in his Règne Animal, gives at considerable length the anthropological characteristics of Man, and places him as the only species of the genus Homo, the only genus of the order Bimana = two-handed; the apes being Quadrumana = four-handed. This was the great practical recognition of Man in his zoological relations.

In respect to the Ethnology, the classification of Blumenbach was modified—and that by increasing its generality. The absolute primary divisions were reduced to three—the Malay and the American being—not without hesitation—subordinated to the Mongolian. Meanwhile, an additional prominence was given to the group which contained the Australians of Australia, and the Papuans of New Guinea. Instead, however, of being definitely placed, it was left for further investigation.

The abuse of the term Caucasian was encouraged. Blumenbach had merely meant that his favourite specimen had exhibited the best points in the greatest degree. Cuvier speaks of traditions that ascribe the origin of mankind to the mountain-range so-called—traditions of no general diffusion, and of less ethnological value.

The time is now convenient for taking a retrospective view of the subject in certain other of its branches. Colour, hair, skin, bone, stature—all these are points of physical conformation or structure; material and anatomical; points which the callipers or the scalpel investigates. But colour, hair, skin, bone, and stature, are not the only characteristics of man; nor yet the only points wherein the members of his species differ from each other. There is the function as well as the organ; and the parts of our body must be considered in regard to what they do as well as with reference to what they are. This brings in the questions of the phænomena of growth and decay,—the average duration of life,—reproduction, and other allied functions. This, the physiological rather than the purely anatomical part of the subject, requires a short notice of its own. A priori, we are inclined to say that it would be closely united, in the practice of investigation, with what it is so closely allied as a branch of science. Yet such has not been exactly the case. The anatomists were physiologists as well; and when Blumenbach described a skull, he, certainly, thought about the power, or the want of power, of the brain which it contained. But the speculators in physiology were not also anatomists. Such speculators, however, there were. An historian aspires to philosophy. There are some facts which he would account for; others on which he would build a system. Hot climates favour precocity of the sexual functions. They also precipitate the decay of the attractions of youth. Hence, a woman who is a mother at twelve has outgrown her beauty at twenty. From this it follows that mental power and personal attractions become, necessarily, disunited. Hence the tendency on the part of the males to take wives in succession; whereby polygamy is shown to have originated in a law of nature.

I do not ask whether this is true or false. I merely remind the reader that the moment such remarks occur, the natural history of Man has become recognized as an ingredient in the civil.

The chief early writers who expanded the real and supposed facts of the natural history of Man, without being professed ethnologists, were Montesquieu and Herder. By advertising the subject, they promoted it. It is doubtful whether they did more.

We are still within the pale of physical phænomena; and the purely intellectual, mental, or moral characteristics of Man have yet to be considered. What divisions were founded upon the difference between the arts of the Negro and the arts of the Parisian? What upon the contrast between the despotisms of Asia and the constitutions of Europe? What between the cannibalism of New Zealand and the comparatively graminivorous diet of the Hindu? There were not wanting naturalists who even in natural history insisted upon the high value of such characters, immaterial and supra-sensual as they were. The dog and fox, the hare and rabbit were alike in form; different in habits and temper—yet the latter fact had to be recognized. Nay, more, it helped to verify the specific distinctions which the mere differences of form might leave doubtful.

All that can be said upon this matter is, that no branch of the subject was earlier studied than that which dealt with the manners and customs of strange nations; whilst no branch of it both was and is half so defective as that which teaches us their value as characteristics. With ten writers familiar with the same facts there shall be ten different ways of appreciating them:—

“Manserunt hodieque manent vestigia ruris.”

In the year 1851, this is the weakest part of the science.

With one exception, however—indefinite and inappreciable as may be the ethnological value of such differences as those which exist between the superstitions, moral feelings, natural affections, or industrial habits of different families, there is one great intellectual phænomenon which in definitude yields to no characteristic whatever—I mean Language. Whatever may be said against certain over-statements as to constancy, it is an undoubted fact that identity of language is primâ facie evidence of identity of origin.

No reasonable man has denied this. It is not conclusive, but primâ facie it undoubtedly is. More cannot be said of colour, skin, hair, and skeleton. Possibly, not so much.

Again, language without being identical may be similar; just as individuals without being brothers or sisters may be first or second cousins. Similarity, then, is primâ facie evidence of relationship.

Lastly, this similarity may be weighed, measured, and expressed numerically; an important item in its value. Out of 100 words in two allied languages, a per-centage of any amount between 1 and 99 may coincide. Language then is a definite test, if it be nothing else. It has another recommendation; or perhaps I should say convenience. It can be studied in the closet: so that for one traveller who describes what he sees in some far-distant country, there may be twenty scholars at work in the libraries of Europe. This is only partially the case with the osteologist.

Philological ethnology began betimes; long before ethnology, or even anthropology—which arose earlier—had either a conscious separate existence or a name. It began even before the physical researches of Buffon.

“There is more in language than in any of its productions”—Many who by no means undervalue the great productions of literature join in this: indeed it is only saying that the Greek language is a more wonderful fact than the Homeric poems, or the Æschylean drama. This, however, is only an expression of admiration at the construction of so marvellous an instrument as human speech.

“When history is silent, language is evidence”—This is an explicit avowal of its value as an instrument of investigation.

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.

But there is still something wanting. The relation of the sciences to the other branches of knowledge requires fixing. With anthropology the case is pretty clear. It comes into partial contact with the naturalist sciences (or those based on the principle of classification) and the biological (or those based on the idea of organization and life).

Ethnology, however, is more undecided in respect to position. If it be but a form of history, its place amongst the inductive sciences is equivocal; since neither the laws which it developes nor the method of pursuing it give it a place here. These put it in the same category with a series of records taken from the testimony of witnesses, or with a book of travels—literary but not scientific. And so it really is to a certain extent. Two remarkable productions, however, have determined its relations to be otherwise.

In Sir C. Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ we have an elaborate specimen of reasoning from the known to the unknown, and of the inference of causes from effects. It would have been discreditable to our philosophy if such a sample of logic put in practice had been disregarded.

Soon after, came forth the pre-eminently suggestive works, par nobile, of the present Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Here we are taught that in the sciences of geology, ethnology, and archæology, the method determines the character of the study; and that in all these we argue backwards. Present effects we know; we also know their causes as far as the historical period goes back. When we get beyond this, we can still reason—reason from the experience that the historical period has supplied. Climate, for instance, and certain other conditions have some effect; within the limits of generation a small, within that of a millenium a larger one. Hence, before we dismiss a difference as inexplicable, we must investigate the changes that may have produced it, the conditions which may have determined those changes, and the time required from the exhibition of their influence.

In Dr. Prichard’s ‘Anniversary Address,’ delivered before the Ethnological Society of London in 1847—a work published after the death of its illustrious author—this relationship to Geology is emphatically recognized:—“Geology, as every one knows, is not an account of what nature produces in the present day, but of what it has long ago produced. It is an investigation of the changes which the surface of our planet has undergone in ages long since past. The facts on which the inferences of geology are founded, are collected from various parts of Natural History. The student of geology inquires into the processes of nature which are at present going on, but this is for the purpose of applying the knowledge so acquired to an investigation of what happened in past times, and of tracing, in the different layers of the earth’s crust—displaying, as they do, relics of various forms of organic life—the series of the repeated creations which have taken place. This investigation evidently belongs to History or Archæology, rather than to what is termed Natural History. By a learned writer, whose name will ever be connected with the annals of the British Association, the term Palæontology has been aptly applied to sciences of this department, for which Physical Archæology may be used as a synonym. Palæontology includes both Geology and Ethnology. Geology is the archæology of the globe—ethnology that of its human inhabitants.”

When ethnology loses its palæontological character, it loses half its scientific elements; and the practical and decided recognition of this should be the characteristic of the English school of ethnologists.

This chapter will conclude with the notice of the bearings of the palæontological method upon one of the most difficult parts of ethnology, viz. the identification of ancient populations, or the distribution of the nations mentioned by the classical, scriptural and older oriental writers amongst the existing or extinct stocks and families of mankind.

There are the Etruscans—who were they? The Pelasgians—who were they? The Huns that overrun Europe in the fifth century; the Cimmerii that devastated Asia, 900 years earlier? Archæology answers some of these questions; and the testimony of ancient writers helps us in others. Yet both mislead—perhaps, almost as often as they direct us rightly. If it were not so, there would be less discrepancy of opinion.

Nevertheless, up to the present time the primary fact concerning any such populations has always been the testimony of some ancient historian or geographer, and the first question that has been put is, What say Tacitus—Strabo—Herodotus—Ptolemy, &c. &c.? In critical hands the inquiries go further; and statements are compared, testimonies weighed in a balance against each other, the opportunities of knowing, and the honesty in recording of the respective authors investigated. In this way a sketch of ancient Greece by Thucydides has a value which the authority of a lesser writer would fail to give it—and so on with others. Nevertheless, what Thucydides wrote he wrote from report, and inferences—report, most probably, carefully weighed, and inferences legitimately drawn. Yet sources of error, for which he is not to be held responsible, are innumerable. He went upon hearsay evidence—he sifted it, perhaps; but still he went upon hearsay evidence only. How do we value such evidence? By the natural probabilities of the account it constitutes. By what means do we ascertain these?

I submit there is but one measure here—the existing state of things as either known to ourselves, or known to contemporaries capable of learning them at the period nearest the time under consideration. This we examine as the effect of some antecedent cause—or series of causes. Ποῦ στῶ; says the scholar. On the dictum of such or such an author. Ποῦ στῶ; says the Archimedean ethnologist. On the last testified fact.

Of the unsatisfactory character of anything short of contemporary testimony in the identification of ancient nations, the pages and pages that nine-tenths of the historians bestow upon the mysterious Pelasgi is a specimen. Add Niebuhr to Müller, and Thirlwall to Niebuhr—Pelion to Ossa, and Olympus to Pelion—and what facts do we arrive at—facts that we may rely on as such, facts supported by contemporary evidence, and recorded under opportunities of being ascertained? Just the three recognized by Mr. Grote; viz. that their language was spoken at Khreston—that it was spoken at Plakeæ—that it differed, in some unascertained degree, from the Greek.

This is all that the ethnologist recognizes; and from this he argues as he best can. Every fact, less properly supported by either first-hand or traceable evidence, he treats with indifference. It may be good in history; but it is not good for him. He has too much use to put it to, too much to build upon it, too much argument to work out of it, to allow it to be other than unimpeachable.

Again—Tacitus carries his Germania as far as the Niemen, so as to include the present countries of Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, West and East Prussia, and Courland. Is this improbable in itself? No. The area is by no means immoderately large. Is it improbable when we take the present state of those countries in question? No. They are German at present. Is it improbable in any case? and if so, in what? Yes. It becomes improbable when we remember that the present Germans have been as unequivocally and undoubtedly recent immigrants for the parts in question, as are the English of the Valley of the Mississippi, and that at the beginning of the historical period the whole of them were Slavonic, with nothing but the phraseology of Tacitus to prevent us from believing that they always had been so. But it is also improbable that so respectable a writer as Tacitus should be mistaken. Granted. And here begins the conflict of difficulties. Nevertheless, the primary ethnological fact is the state of things as it existed when the countries under consideration were first accurately known, taken along with the probability or improbability of its having so existed for a certain period previous, as compared with the probability or improbability of the migrations and other assumptions necessary for its recent introduction.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The value of Tacitus as an authority is minutely investigated in an ethnological edition of the Germania by the present writer, now in course of publication. The object of the present chapter is merely to show the extent to which the science in question is of recent, rather than ancient, origin.

[2] Barr’s Translation, vol. iv. p. 191.

[CHAPTER II.]

Ethnology—its objects—the chief problems connected with it—prospective questions—transfer of populations—Extract from Knox—correlation of certain parts of the body to certain external influences—parts less subject to such influences—retrospective questions—the unity or non-unity of our species—opinions—plurality of species—multiplicity of protoplasts—doctrine of development—Dokkos—Extract—antiquity of our species—its geographical origin—the term race.

In Cuvier—as far as he goes—we find the anthropological view of the subject predominant; and this is what we expect from the nature of the work in which it occurs: the degree in which one genus or species differs from the species or genus next to it being the peculiar consideration of the systematic naturalist. To exhibit our varieties would have required a special monograph.

In Prichard on the contrary ethnology preponderates; of anthropology, in the strict sense of the word, there being but little; and the ethnology is of a broad and comprehensive kind. Description there is, and classification there is; but, besides this, there is a great portion of the work devoted to what may be called Ethnological Dynamics, i. e. the appreciation of the effect of the external conditions of climate, latitude, relative sea-level and the like upon the human body.

Prichard is the great repertory of facts; and read with Whewell’s commentary it gives us the Science in a form sufficiently full for the purposes of detail, and sufficiently systematic for the basis of further generalization. Still it must be read with the commentary already mentioned. If not, it fails in its most intellectual element; and becomes a system of simple records, rather than a series of subtle and peculiar inferences. So read, however, it gives us our facts and classifications in a working form. In other words, the Science has now taken its true place and character.

If more than this be needed—and for the anthropology, it may be thought by some that Cuvier is too brief, and Prichard too exclusively ethnological—the work of [Lawrence] forms the complement. These, along with Adelung and Klaproth, form the Thesaurus Ethnologicus. But the facts which they supply are like the sword of the Mahometan warrior. Its value depended on the arm that wielded it; and such is the case here. No book has yet been written which can implicitly be taken for much more than its facts. Its inferences and classification must be criticised. Be this, however, as it may, in A.D. 1846 Mr. Mill writes, that “concerning the physical nature of man, as an organized being, there has been much controversy, which can only be terminated by the general acknowledgement and employment of stricter rules of induction than are commonly recognized; there is, however, a considerable body of truth which all who have attended to the subject consider to be fully established, nor is there now any radical imperfection in the method observed in this department of science by its most distinguished modern teachers.”

This could not have been written thirty years ago. The department of science would, then, have been indefinite; and the teachers would not have been distinguished.

It may now be as well to say what Ethnology and Anthropology are not. Their relations to history have been considered. Archæology illustrates each; yet the moment that it is confounded with either, mischief follows. Psychology, or the Science of the laws of Mind, has the same relation to them as Physiology—mutatis mutandis; i.e. putting Mind in the place of Body.

But nearer than either are its two subordinate studies of Ethology[3], or the Science of Character, by which we determine the kind of character produced in conformity with the laws of Mind, by any set of circumstances, physical as well as moral; and the Science of Society which investigates the action and reaction of associated masses[4] on each other.

Such then is our Science; which the principle of Division of Labour requires to be marked off clearly in order to be worked advantageously. And now we ask the nature of its objects. It has not much to do with the establishment of any laws of remarkable generality; a circumstance which, in the eyes of some, may subtract from its value as a science; the nearest approach to anything of this kind being the general statement implied in the classifications themselves. Its real object is the solution of certain problems—problems which it investigates by its own peculiar method—and problems of sufficient height and depth and length and breadth to satisfy the most ambitious. All these are referable to two heads, and connect themselves with either the past or the future history of our species; its origin or destination.

We see between the Negro and the American a certain amount of difference. Has this always existed? If not, how was it brought about? By what influences? In what time? Quickly or slowly? These questions point backwards, and force upon us the consideration of what has been.

But the next takes us forwards. Great experiments in the transfer of populations from one climate to another have gone on ever since the discovery of America, and are going on now; sometimes westwards as to the New World; sometimes eastwards as to Australia and New Zealand; now from Celtic populations like Ireland; now from Gothic countries like England and Germany; now from Spain and Portugal;—to say nothing of the equally great phænomenon of Negro slavery being the real or supposed condition of American prosperity. Will this succeed? Ask this at Philadelphia, or Lima, Sydney, or Auckland, and the answer is pretty sure to be in the affirmative. Ask it of one of our English anatomists. His answer is as follows:—“Let us attend now to the greatest of all experiments ever made in respect of the transfer of a population indigenous to one continent, and attempting by emigration to take possession of another; to cultivate it with their own hands; to colonize it; to persuade the world, in time, that they are the natives of the newly occupied land. Northern America and Australia furnished the fields of this, the greatest of experiments. Already has the horse, the sheep, the ox, become as it were indigenous to these lands. Nature did not place them there at first, yet they seem to thrive and flourish, and multiply exceedingly. Yet, even as regards these domestic animals, we cannot be quite certain. Will they eventually be self-supporting? Will they supplant the llama, the kangaroo, the buffalo, the deer? or in order to effect this, will they require to be constantly renovated from Europe? If this be the contingency, then the acclimatation is not perfect. How is it with man himself? The man planted there by nature, the Red-Indian, differs from all others on the face of the earth; he gives way before the European races, the Saxon and the Celtic; the Celt, Iberian, and the Lusitanian in the south; the Celt and the Saxon in the north.

“Of the tropical regions of the New World, I need not speak; every one knows that none but those whom nature placed there can live there; that no Europeans can colonize a tropical country. But may there not be some doubts of their self-support in milder regions? Take the Northern States themselves. There the Saxon and the Celt seem to thrive beyond all that is recorded in history. But are we quite sure that this is fated to be permanent? Annually from Europe is poured a hundred thousand men and women of the best blood of the Scandinavian, and twice the number of the pure Celt; and so long as this continues, he is sure to thrive. But check it, arrest it suddenly, as in the case of Mexico and Peru; throw the onus of reproduction upon the population, no longer European, but a struggle between the European alien and his adopted father-land. The climate; the forests; the remains of the aborigines not yet extinct; last, not least, that unknown and mysterious degradation of life and energy, which in ancient times seems to have decided the fate of all the Phœnician, Grecian, and Coptic colonies. Cut off from their original stock, they gradually withered and faded, and finally died away. The Phœnician never became acclimatized in Africa, nor in Cornwall, nor in Wales; vestiges of his race, it is true, still remain, but they are mere vestiges. Peru and Mexico are fast retrograding to their primitive condition; may not the Northern States, under similar circumstances, do the same?

“Already the United States man differs in appearance from the European: the ladies early lose their teeth; in both sexes the adipose cellular cushion interposed between the skin and the aponeuroses and muscles disappears, or, at least, loses its adipose portion; the muscles become stringy, and show themselves; the tendons appear on the surface; symptoms of premature decay manifest themselves. Now what do these signs, added to the uncertainty of infant life in the Southern States, and the smallness of their families in the Northern, indicate? Not the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon into the Red-Indian, but warnings that the climate has not been made for him, nor he for the climate.

“See what even a small amount of insulation has done for the French Celt in Lower Canada. Look at the race there! Small men, small horses, small cattle, still smaller carts, ideas smallest of all; he is not even the Celt of modern France! He is the French Celt of the Regency, the thing of Louis XIII. Stationary—absolutely stationary—his numbers, I believe, depend on the occasional admixture of fresh blood from Europe. He has increased to a million since his first settlement in Canada; but much of this has come from Britain, and not from France. Give us the statistics of the original families who keep themselves apart from the fresh blood imported into the province. Let us have the real and solid increase of the original habitans, as they are pleased to call themselves, and then we may calculate on the result.

“Had the colony been left to itself, cut off from Europe, for a century or two, it is my belief that the forest and the buffalo, and the Red-Indian, would have pushed him into the St. Lawrence[5].”

I give no opinion as to the truth of the extract; remarking that, whether right or wrong, it is forcibly and confidently expressed. All that the passage has to do is to illustrate the character of the question. It directs our consideration to what will be.

To work out questions in either of these classes, there must, of course, be some reference to the general operations of climate, food, and other influences;—operations which imply a correlative susceptibility of modification on the part of the human organism.

In a well-constructed machine, the different parts have a definite relation to each. The greater the resistance, the thicker the ropes and chains; and the thicker the ropes and chains, the stronger the pulleys; the stronger the pulleys, the greater the force; and so on throughout. Delicate pulleys with heavy ropes, or light lines with bulky pulleys, would be so much power wasted. The same applies to the skeleton. If the muscle be massive, the bone to which it is attached must be firm; otherwise there is a disproportion of parts. In this respect the organized and animated body agrees with a common machine, the work of human hands. It agrees with, but it also surpasses it. It has an internal power of self-adjustment. No amount of work would convert a thin line into a strong rope, or a light framework into a strong one. If bulk be wanted, it must be given in the first instance. But what is it with the skeleton, the framework to the muscles? It has the power of adapting itself to the stress laid upon it. The food that we live upon is of different degrees of hardness and toughness; and the harder and tougher it is, the more work is there for the muscles of the lower jaw. But, as these work, they grow; for—other things being equal—size is power; and as they grow, other parts must grow also. There are the bones. How they grow is a complex question. Sometimes a smooth surface becomes rough, a fine bone coarse; sometimes a short process becomes lengthened, or a narrow one broadens; sometimes the increase is simple or absolute, and the bone in question changes its character without affecting that of the parts in contact with it. But frequently there is a complication of changes, and the development of one bone takes place at the expense of another; the relations of the different portions of parts of a skeleton being thus altered.

A skeleton, then, may be modified by the action of its own muscles; in other words, wherever there are muscles that are liable to an increase of mass, there are bones similarly susceptible—bones upon which asperities, ridges, or processes may be developed—bones from which asperities, ridges, or processes may disappear, and bones of which the relative proportions may be varied. In order, however, that this must take place, there must be the muscular action which determines it.

Now this applies to the hard parts, or the skeleton; and as it is generally admitted, that if the bony framework of the body can be thus modified by the action of its own muscles, the extreme conditions of heat, light, aliment, moisture, &c., will, à fortiori, affect the soft parts, such as the skin and adipose tissue. Neither have any great difficulties been raised in respect to the varieties of colour in the iris, and of colour and texture, both, in the hair.

But what if we have in certain hard parts a difference without its corresponding tangible modifying cause? What if parts which no muscle acts upon vary? In such a case we have a new class of facts, and a new import given to it. We no longer draw our illustrations from the ropes and pulleys of machines. Adaptation there may be, but it is no longer an adaptation of the simple straightforward kind that we have exhibited. It is an adaptation on the principle which determines the figure-head of a vessel, not one on the principle which decides the rigging. Still there is a principle on both sides; on one, however, there is an evident connection of cause and effect; on the other, the notion of choice, or spontaneity of an idea, is suggested.

In this way, the consideration of a tooth differs from that of the jaw in which it is implanted. No muscles act directly upon it; and all that pressure at its base can do is to affect the direction of its growth. The form of its crown it leaves untouched. How—I am using almost the words of Prof. Owen—can we conceive the development of the great canine of the chimpanzee to be a result of external stimuli, or to have been influenced by muscular actions, when it is calcified before it cuts the gum, or displaces its deciduous predecessor—a structure preordained, a weapon prepared prior to the development of the forces by which it is to be wielded[6]?

This illustrates the difference between the parts manifestly obnoxious to the influence of external conditions and the parts which either do not vary at all, or vary according to unascertained laws.

With the former we look to the conditions of sun, air, habits, or latitude; the latter we interpret, as we best can, by references to other species or to the same in its earlier stages of development.

Thus, the so-called supra-orbital ridge, or the prominence of the lower portion of forehead over the nose and eyes, is more marked in some individuals than in others; and more marked in the African and Australian varieties than our own. This is an ethnological fact.

Again—and this is an anthropological fact—it is but moderately developed in man at all: whilst in the orang-utan it is moderate; and in the chimpanzee enormously and characteristically developed.

Hence it is one of the nine points whereby the Pithecus Wurmbii approaches man more closely than the [Troglodytes] Gorilla[7], in opposition to the twenty-four whereby the Troglodytes Gorilla comes nearer to us than the Pithecus Wurmbii.

Had this ridge given attachment to muscles, we should have asked what work those muscles did, and how far it varied in different regions, instead of thinking much about either the Pithecus Wurmbii or the Troglodytes Gorilla.

However, it is certain problems which constitute the higher branches of ethnology; and it is to the investigation of these that the department of ethnological dynamics is subservient. Looking backwards we find, first amongst the foremost, the grand questions as to—

• 1. The unity or non-unity of the species.
• 2. Its antiquity.
• 3. Its geographical origin.

The unity or non-unity of the human species has been contemplated under a great multiplicity of aspects; some involving the fact itself, some the meaning of the term species.

• 1. Certain points of structure are constant. This is one reason for making man the only species of genus, and the only genus of his order.
• 2. All mixed breeds are prolific. This is another.
• 3. The evidence of language indicates a common origin; and the simplest form of this is a single pair. This is a third.
• 4. We can predicate a certain number of general propositions concerning the class of beings called Human. This merely separates them from all other classes. It does not determine the nature of the class itself in respect to its members. It may fall in divisions and subdivisions.
• 5. The species may be one; but the number of first pairs may be numerous. This is the doctrine of the multiplicity of protoplasts[8].
• 6. The species may have had no protoplast at all; but may have been developed out of some species anterior to it, and lower in the scale of Nature, this previous species itself having been so evolved. In this case, the protoplast is thrown indefinitely backwards; in other words, the protoplast of one species is the protoplast of many.
• 7. The genus Homo may fall into several species; so that what some call the varieties of a single species are really different species of a single genus.
• 8. The varieties of mankind may be too great to be included in even a genus. There may be two or even more genera to an order.
• 9. Many of the present varieties may represent the intermixtures of species no longer extant in a pure state.
• 10. All known varieties may be referable to a single species; but there may be new species undescribed.
• 11. All existing varieties may be referable to a single species; but certain species may have ceased to exist.

Such are the chief views which are current amongst learned men on this point; though they have not been exhibited in a strictly logical form, inasmuch as differences of opinion as to the meaning of the term species have been given in the same list with differences of opinion as to the fact of our unity or non-unity.

These differences of opinion are not limited to mere matters of inference. The facts on which such inferences rest are by no means unanimously admitted. Some deny the constancy of certain points of structure, and more deny the permanent fecundity of mixed breeds. Again, the evidence of language applies only to known tongues; whilst the fourth view is based upon a logical rather than a zoological view of species.

The doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts is common. Many zoologists hold it, and they have of course zoological reasons for doing so. Others hold it upon grounds of a very different description—grounds which rest upon the assumption of a final cause. Man is a social animal. Let the import of this be ever so little exaggerated. The term is a correlative one. The wife is not enough to the husband; the pair requires its pair for society’s sake. Hence, if man be not formed to live alone now, he was not formed alone at first. To be born a member of society, there must be associates. This is the teleological[9]—perhaps it may be called the theological—reason for the multiplicity of protoplasts.

Its non-inductive character subtracts something from its value.

The difficulty of drawing a line as to the magnitude of the original society subtracts more. If we admit a second pair, why not grant a village, a town, a city and its corporation? &c.

Again, this is either a primitive civilization or something very like it. Where are its traces? Nevertheless, if we grant certain assumptions in respect to the history of human civilization, the teleological doctrine of the multiplicity of protoplasts is difficult to refute.

And so is the zoological; provided that we make concessions in the way of language. Let certain pairs have been created with the capacity but not the gift of speech, so that they shall have learned their language of others. Or let all, at first, have been in this predicament, and some have evolved speech earlier than others—a speech eventually extended to all. It is not easy to answer such an argument as this.

The multiplicity of protoplasts is common ground to the zoologist and the human naturalist, although the phænomena of speech and society give the latter the larger share. The same applies to the doctrine of development. The fundamental affinity which connects all the forms of human speech is valid against the transcendentalist only when he assumes that each original of a species of Man appeared, as such, with his own proper language. Let him allow this to have been originally dumb, and with only the capacity of learning speech from others, and all arguments in favour of the unity of species drawn from the similarity of language fall to the ground.

The eighth doctrine is little more than an exaggeration of the seventh. The seventh will not be noticed now, simply because the facts which it asserts and denies pervade the whole study of ethnology, and appear and re-appear at every point of our investigations.

All known varieties may be referable to a single species; but there may be other species undescribed.—What are the reasons for believing this? Premising that Dilbo was a slave from whom Dr. Beke collected certain information respecting the countries to the south-west of Abyssinia, I subjoin the following extract:—

“The countries on the west and south-west of Kaffa are, according to Dilbo, Damboro, Bonga, Koolloo, Kootcha, Soofa, Tooffte, and Doko; on the east and south-east are the plains of Woratto, Walamo, and Talda.

“The country of Doko is a month’s journey distant from Kaffa; and it seems that only those merchants who are dealers in slaves go farther than Kaffa. The most common route passes Kaffa in a south-westerly direction, leading to Damboro, afterwards to Kootcha, Koolloo, and then passing the river Erow to Tooffte, where they begin to hunt the slaves in Doko, of which chase I shall give a description as it has been stated to me, and the reader may use his own judgement respecting it.

“Dilbo begins with stating that the people of Doko, both men and women, are said to be no taller than boys nine or ten years old. They never exceed that height, even in the most advanced age. They go quite naked; their principal food are ants, snakes, mice, and other things which commonly are not used as food. They are said to be so skilful in finding out the ants and snakes, that Dilbo could not refrain from praising them greatly on that account. They are so fond of this food, that even when they have become acquainted with better aliment in Enarea and Kaffa, they are nevertheless frequently punished for following their inclination of digging in search of ants and snakes, as soon as they are out of sight of their masters. The skins of snakes are worn by them about their necks as ornaments. They also climb trees with great skill to fetch down the fruits; and in doing this they stretch their hands downwards and their legs upwards. They live in extensive forests of bamboo and other woods, which are so thick that the slave-hunter finds it very difficult to follow them in these retreats. These hunters sometimes discover a great number of the Dokos sitting on the trees, and then they use the artifice of showing them shining things, by which they are enticed to descend, when they are captured without difficulty. As soon as a Doko begins to cry he is killed, from the apprehension that this, as a sign of danger, will cause the others to take to their heels. Even the women climb on the trees, where in a few minutes a great number of them may be captured and sold into slavery.

“The Dokos live mixed together; men and women unite and separate as they please; and this Dilbo considers as the reason why the tribe has not been exterminated, though frequently a single slave-dealer returns home with a thousand of them reduced to slavery. The mother suckles the child only as long as she is unable to find ants and snakes for its food: she abandons it as soon as it can get its food by itself. No rank or order exists among the Dokos. Nobody orders, nobody obeys, nobody defends the country, nobody cares for the welfare of the nation. They make no attempts to secure themselves but by running away. They are as quick as monkeys; and they are very sensible of the misery prepared for them by the slave-hunters, who so frequently encircle their forests and drive them from thence into the open plains like beasts. They put their heads on the ground, and stretch their legs upwards, and cry, in a pitiful manner, ‘Yer! yer!’ Thus they call on the Supreme Being, of whom they have some notion, and are said to exclaim, ‘If you do exist, why do you suffer us to die, who do not ask for food or clothes, and who live on snakes, ants, and mice?’ Dilbo stated that it was no rare thing to find five or six Dokos in such a position and state of mind. Sometimes these people quarrel among themselves, when they eat the fruit of the trees; then the stronger one throws the weaker to the ground, and the latter is thus frequently killed in a miserable way.

“In their country it rains incessantly; at least from May to January, and even later the rain does not cease entirely. The climate is not cold, but very wet. The traveller, in going from Kaffa to Doko, must pass over a high country, and cross several rivers, which fall into the Gochob.

“The language of the Dokos is a kind of murmuring, which is understood by no one but themselves and their hunters. The Dokos evince much sense and skill in managing the affairs of their masters, to whom they are soon much attached; and they render themselves valuable to such a degree, that no native of Kaffa ever sells one of them to be sent out of the country. As Captain Clapperton says of the slaves of Nyffie:—‘The very slaves of this people are in great request, and when once obtained are never again sold out of the country.’ The inhabitants of Enarea and Kaffa sell only those slaves which they have taken in their border-wars with the tribes living near them, but never a Doko. The Doko is also averse to being sold; he prefers death to separating from his master, to whom he has attached himself.

“The access to the country of Doko is very difficult, as the inhabitants of Damboro, Koolloo, and Tooffte are enemies to the traders from Kaffa, though these tribes are dependent on Kaffa, and pay tribute to its sovereigns; for these tribes are intent on preserving for themselves alone the exclusive privilege of hunting the Dokos, and of trading with the slaves thus obtained.

“Dilbo did not know whether the tribes residing south and west of the Dokos persecute this unhappy nation in the same cruel way.

“This is Dilbo’s account of the Dokos, a nation of pigmies, who are found in so degraded a condition of human nature that it is difficult to give implicit credit to his account. The notion of a nation of pigmies in the interior of Africa is very ancient, as Herodotus speaks of them in II. 32.”

Now those who believe in the Dokos at all, may fairly believe them to constitute a new species.

Other imperfectly known populations may be put forward in a similar point of view.

All existing varieties may be referable to a single species; but certain species may have ceased to exist.—There is a considerable amount of belief in this respect. We see, in certain countries, which are at present barbarous vestiges of a prior civilization, works, like those of Mexico and Peru for instance, which the existing inhabitants confess to be beyond their powers. Be it so. Is the assumption of a different species with architectural propensities more highly developed, legitimate? The reader will answer this question in his own way. I can only say that such assumptions have been made.

Again—ancient tombs exhibit skeletons which differ from the living individuals of the country. Is a similar assumption here justifiable? It has been made.

The most remarkable phænomena of the kind in question are to be found in the history of the Peruvians.

The parts about the Lake Titicaca form the present country of the Aymaras, whose heads are much like those of the other Americans, whose taste for architecture is but slight, and whose knowledge of having descended from a people more architectural than themselves is none.

Nevertheless, there are vast ruins in their district; whilst the heads of those whose remains are therein preserved have skulls with the sutures obliterated, and with remarkable frontal, lateral, and occipital depressions.

Does this denote an extinct species? Individually, I think it does not; because, individually, with many others, I know that certain habits decline, and I also believe that the flattenings of the head are artificial. Nevertheless, if I, ever so little, exaggerated the permanency of habits, or if I identified a habit with an instinct, or if I considered the skulls natural, the chances are that I should recognise the remains of ancient stock—possibly an ancient species—without congeners and without descendants.

The antiquity of the human species.—Our views on this point depend upon our views as to its unity or non-unity; so much so, that unless we assume either one or the other, the question of antiquity is impracticable. And it must also be added that, unless the inquiry is to be excessively complicated, the unity-doctrine must take the form of descent from a single pair.

Assuming this, we take the most extreme specimens of difference, whether it be in the way of physical conformation or mental phænomena—of these last, language being the most convenient. After this, we ask the time necessary for bringing about the changes effected; the answer to this resting upon the induction supplied within the historical period; an answer requiring the application of what has already been called Ethnological Dynamics.

On the other hand, we may assume a certain amount of original difference, and investigate the time requisite for effecting the existing amount of similarity.

The first of these methods requires a long, the second a short period; indeed, descent from a single pair implies a geological rather than a historical date.

Furthermore—that uniformity in the average rate of change which the geologist requires, ethnology requires also.

The geographical origin of Man.—Supposing all the varieties of Man to have originated from a single protoplast pair, in what part of the world was that single protoplast pair placed? Or, supposing such protoplast pairs to have been numerous, what were the respective original locations of each? I ask these questions without either giving any answer to them, or exhibiting any method for discovering one. Of the three great problems it is the one which has received the least consideration, and the one concerning which there is the smallest amount of decided opinion. The conventional, provisional, or hypothetical cradle of the human species is, of course, the most central point of the inhabited world; inasmuch as this gives us the greatest amount of distribution with the least amount of migration; but, of course, such a centre is wholly unhistorical.

Race—What is the meaning of this word?

Does it mean variety? If so, why not say variety at once?

Does it mean species? If it do, one of the two phrases is superfluous.

In simple truth it means either or neither, as the case may be; and is convenient or superfluous according to the views of the writer who uses it.

If he believe that groups and classes like the Negro, the Hottentot, the American, the Australian, or the Mongolian, differ from each other as the dog differs from the fox, he talks of species. He has made up his mind.

But, perhaps, he does no such thing. His mind is made up the other way. Members of such classes may be to Europeans, and to each other, just what the cur is to the pug, the pointer to the beagle, &c. They may be varieties.

He uses, then, the terms accordingly; but, in order to do so, he must have made up his mind; and certain classes must represent either one or the other.

But what if he have not done this? If, instead of teaching undoubted facts, he is merely investigating doubtful ones? In this case the term race is convenient. It is convenient for him during his pursuit of an opinion, and during the consequent suspension of his opinion.

Race, then, is the term denoting a species or variety, as the case may be—pendente lite. It is a term which, if it conceals our ignorance, proclaims our openness to conviction.

Of the prospective views of humanity, one has been considered. But there are others of at least equal importance. Two, out of many, may serve as samples.

1. The first is suggested by the following Table; taken from a fuller one in Mr. D. Wilson’s valuable Archæology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland. It shows the relative proportions of a series of skulls of very great, with those of a series of moderate antiquity.

The study of this—and it requires to be studied carefully—gives grounds for believing that the capacity of a skull may increase as the social condition improves; from which it follows that the physical organization of the less-favoured stocks may develope itself progressively,—and, pari passu, the mental power that coincides with it. This illustrates the nature of a certain ethnological question. But what if the two classes of skulls belong to different stocks; so that the owners of the one were not the progenitors of the proprietors of the other? Such a view (and it is not unreasonable) illustrates the extent to which it is complicated.

[Transcriber’s Note: The measurements in the table are in inches and twelfths.]

[[Version of the table for narrower screens]]

2. The second, like the first, shall be explained by extracts:—

a. Mrs. ——, a neighbour of Mr. M’Combie, was twice married, and had issue by both husbands. The children of the first marriage were five in number; by the second, three. One of these three, a daughter, bears an unmistakeable resemblance to her mother’s first husband. What makes the likeness the more discernible is, that there was the most marked difference, in their features and general appearance, between the two husbands.

b. A young woman, residing in Edinburgh, and born of white (Scottish) parents, but whose mother some time previous to her marriage had a natural (Mulatto) child, by a negro-servant, in Edinburgh, exhibits distinct traces of the negro. Dr. Simpson, whose patient the young woman at one time was, has had no recent opportunities of satisfying himself as to the precise extent to which the negro character prevails in her features; but he recollects being struck with the resemblance, and noticed particularly that the hair had the qualities characteristic of the negro.

c. Mrs. ——, apparently perfectly free from scrofula, married a man who died of phthisis; she had one child by him, which also died of phthisis. She next married a person who was to all appearance equally healthy as herself, and had two children by him, one of which died of phthisis, the other of tubercular mesenteric disease—having, at the same time, scrofulous ulceration of the under extremity.

There are the elements of a theory here; especially if they be taken along with certain phænomena, well-known to the breeders of race-horses—the theory being, that the mixture of the distinctive characters of different divisions of mankind may be greater than the intermixture itself. I give no opinion on the data. I merely illustrate an ethnological question—one out of many.

FOOTNOTES

[3] From the Greek word (ἦθος) ethos = character.

[4] Called by Comte Sociology, a name half Latin and half Greek, and consequently too barbarous to be used, if its use can be avoided.

[5] Knox, Races of Men, pp. 73, 74.

[6] On the Osteology of the Great Chimpanzee. By Professor Owen, in the Philosophical Transactions.

[7] Owen, Philosophical Transactions, Feb. 22, 1848.

[8] From protos = first, and plastos = formed.

[9] From the Greek telos = an end.

[CHAPTER III.]

Methods—the science one of observation and deduction rather than experiment—classification—on mineralogical, on zoological principles—the first for Anthropology, the second for Ethnology—value of Language as a test—instances of its loss—of its retention—when it proves original relation, when intercourse—the grammatical and glossarial tests—classifications must be real—the distribution of Man—size of area—ethnological contrasts in close geographical contact—discontinuity and isolation of areas—oceanic migrations.

In the Natural History of Man we must keep almost exclusively to the methods of deduction and observation; and in observation we are limited to one sort only, i. e. that simple and spontaneous kind where the object can be found if sought for, but cannot be artificially produced. In other words, there is no great room for experiment. The corpus is not vile enough for the purpose. Besides which, “even if we suppose unlimited power of varying the experiment (which is abstractedly possible), though no one but an oriental despot either has the power, or if he had would be disposed to exercise it, a still more essential condition is wanting—the power of performing any of the experiments with scientific accuracy[10].” Experiment is nearly as much out of place in Ethnology and Anthropology as it is in Astronomy.

Psammetichus, to be sure, according to Herodotus, did as follows. He took children of a poor man, put them in the charge of a shepherd who was forbidden to speak in their presence, suckled them in a lone hut through a she-goat, waited for the age at which boys begin to talk, and then took down the first word they uttered. This was bekos, which when it was shown to mean in the Phrygian language bread, the Egyptians yielded the palm of antiquity to that rival.

Now this was an ethnological experiment; but then Psammetichus was an oriental despot; and the instance itself is, probably, the only one of its class—the only one, or nearly so—the only one which is a true experiment; since in order to be such there must be a definite and specific end or object in view.

We know the tradition about Newton and the apple. This, if true, was no experiment, but an observation. To have been the former, the tree should have been shaken for the purpose of seeing the fruit descend. There would then have been an end and aim—malice prepense, so to say.

Hence the phænomena of the African slave-trade, of English emigration, and of other similar elements for observation are no experiments; since it has not been Science that either the slaver or the settler ever thought about. Sugar or cotton, land or money, was what ran in their heads.

The revolting operation by which the jealous Oriental labours to secure the integrity of his harem is in its end a scientific fact. It tells how much the whole system sympathises with the mutilation of one of its parts. But it is nothing for Science to either applaud or imitate. It is repeated by the sensual Italian for the sake of ensuring fine voices in the music-market; and Science is disgusted at its repetition. Even if done in her own name, and for her own objects, it would still be but an inhuman and intolerable form of zootomy.

Still the trade in Africans, and the emigration of Englishmen are said to partake of the nature of a scientific experiment, even without being one. They are said to serve as such. So they do; yet not in the way in which they are often interpreted. A European regiment is decimated by being placed on the Gambia, or in Sierra Leone. The American Anglo-Saxon is said to have lost the freshness of the European—to have become brown in colour, and wiry in muscle. Perhaps he has. Yet what does this prove? Merely the effect of sudden changes; the results of distant transplantation; the imperfect character of those forms of acclimatization which are not gradual. It was not in this way that the world was originally peopled. New climates were approached by degrees, step by step, by enlargement and extension of the circumference of a previously acclimated family. Hence the experience of the kind in question, valuable as it is in the way of Medical Police, is comparatively worthless in a theory as to the Migrations of Mankind. Take a man from Caucasus to the Gold Coast, and he either dies or takes a fever. But would he do so if his previous sojourn had been on the Gambia, his grandfather’s on the Senegal, his ancestor’s in the tenth degree on the Nile, and that ancestor’s ancestor’s on the Jordan—thus going back till we reached the first remote patriarch of the migration on the Phasis? This is an experiment which no single generation can either make or observe; yet less than this is no experiment at all, no imitation of that particular operation of Nature which we are so curious to investigate.

What follows applies to Ethnology. The first result we get from our observations is a classification, i. e. groups of individuals, families, tribes, nations, sub-varieties, varieties, and (according to some) of species connected by some common link, and united on some common principle. There is no want of groups of this kind; and many of them are so natural as to be unsusceptible of improvement. Yet the nomenclature for their different divisions is undetermined, the values of many of them uncertain, and, above all, the principle upon which they are formed is by no means uniform. Whilst some investigators classify mankind on Zoological, others do so on what may be called Mineralogical, principles. This difference will be somewhat fully illustrated.

In Africa, as is well known, a great portion of the population is black-skinned; and with this black skin other physical characteristics are generally found in conjunction. Thus the hair is either crisp or woolly, the nose depressed, and the lips thick. As we approach Asia these criteria decrease; the Arab being fairer, better-featured and straighter-haired than the Nubian, and the Persian more so than the Arab. In Hindostan, however, the colour deepens; and by looking amongst the most moist and alluvial parts of the southern peninsula we find skins as dark as those of Africa, and hair crisp rather than straight. Besides this, the fine oval contour and regular features of the high-cast Hindus of the North become scarce, whilst the lips get thick, the skin harsh, and the features coarse.

Further on—we come to the great Peninsula which contains the Kingdoms of Ava and Siam—the Indo-Chinese or Transgangetic Peninsula. In many parts of this the population blackens again; and in the long narrow peninsula of Malacca, a large proportion of the older population has been described as blacks. In the islands we find them again; so much so that the Spanish authorities call them Negritos or Little Negroes. In New Guinea all is black; and in Australia and Van Diemen’s Land it is blacker still. In Australia the hair is generally straight; but in the first and last-named countries it is frizzy, crisped, or curling. This connects them with the Negroes of Africa; and their colour does so still more. At any rate we talk of the Australian Blacks, just as the Spaniards do of the Philippine Negritos. Moral characteristics connect the Australian and the Negro, much in the same manner as the physical ones. Both, as compared with the European, are either really deficient in intellectual capacity, or (at least) have played an unimportant part in the history of the world. Thus, several populations have come under the class of Blacks. Is this classification natural?

It shall be illustrated further. On the extremities of each of the quarters of the world, we find populations that in many respects resemble each other. In Northern Asia and Europe, the Eskimo, Samoeid, and Laplander, tolerant of the cold of the Arctic Circle, are all characterized by a flatness of face, a lowness of stature, and a breadth of head. In some cases the contrast between them and their nearest neighbours to the south, in these respects, is remarkable. The Norwegian who comes in contact with the Lap is strong and well-made; so are many of the Red Indians who front the Eskimo.

At the Cape of Good Hope something of the same sort appears. The Hottentot of the southern extremity of Africa is undersized, small-limbed, and broad-faced; so much so, that most writers, in describing him, have said that, in his conformation, the Mongolian type—to which the Eskimo belongs—Asiatic itself—re-appears in Africa. And then his neighbour the Kaffre differs from him as the Finlander does from the Lap.

Mutatis mutandis, all this re-appears at Cape Horn; where the Patagonian changes suddenly to the Fuegian.

But we in Europe are favoured; our limbs are well-formed and our skin fair. Be it so: yet there are writers who, seeing the extent to which the islanders of the Pacific are favoured also, and noting the degree to which European points of colour, size, and capacity for improvement, real or supposed, re-appear at the Antipodes, have thrown the Polynesian and the Englishman in one and the same class.

And so, perhaps, he is, if we are to judge by certain characteristics: if agreement in certain matters, wherein the intermediate populations differ, form the grounds upon which we make our groups, the Fuegians, Eskimo, and Hottentots form one class, and the Negroes and Australians another. But are these classes natural? That depends upon the questions to which the classification is subservient. If we wish to know how far moisture and coolness freshen the complexion; how far moisture and heat darken it; how far mountain altitudes affect the human frame; in other words, how far common external conditions develope common habits and common points of structure, nothing can be better than the groups in question.

But alter the problem: let us wish to know how certain areas were peopled, what population gave origin to some other, how the Americans reached America, whence the Britons came into England, or any question connected with the migrations, affiliations, and origin of the varieties of our species, and groups of this kind are valueless. They tell us something—but not what we want to know: inasmuch as our question now concerns blood, descent, pedigree, relationship. To tell an inquirer who wishes to deduce one population from another that certain distant tribes agree with the one under discussion in certain points of resemblance, is as irrelevant as to tell a lawyer in search of the next of kin to a client deceased, that though you know of no relations, you can find a man who is the very picture of him in person—a fact good enough in itself, but not to the purpose; except (of course) so far as the likeness itself suggests a relationship—which it may or may not do.

Classes formed irrespective of descent are classes on the Mineralogical, whilst classes formed with a view to the same are classes on the Zoological, principle. Which is wanted in the Natural History of Man? The first for Anthropology; the second for Ethnology.

But why the antagonism? Perhaps the two methods may coincide. The possibility of this has been foreshadowed. The family likeness may, perhaps, prove a family connexion. True: at the same time each case must be tested on its own grounds. Hence, whether the African is to be grouped with the Australian, or whether the two classes are to be as far asunder in Ethnology as in Geography, depends upon the results of the special investigation of that particular connexion—real or supposed. It is sufficient to say that none of the instances quoted exhibit any such relationship; though many a theory—as erroneous as bold—has been started to account for it.

It is for Ethnology, then, that classification is most wanted—more than for Anthropology; even as it is for Zoology that we require orders and genera rather than for Physiology. This is based upon certain distinctive characters; some of which are of a physical, others of a moral sort. Each falls into divisions. There are moral and intellectual phænomena which prove nothing in the way of relationship, simply because they are the effects of a common grade of civilizational development. What would be easier than to group all the hunting, all the piscatory, or all the pastoral tribes together, and to exclude from these all who built cities, milked cows, sowed corn, or ploughed land? Common conditions determine common habits.

Again, much that seems at first glance definite, specific, and characteristic, loses its value as a test of ethnological affinity, when we examine the families in which it occurs. In distant countries, and in tribes far separated, superstition takes a common form, and creeds that arise independently of each other look as if they were deduced from a common origin. All this makes the facts in what may be called the Natural History of the Arts or of Religion easy to collect, but difficult to appreciate; in many cases, indeed, we are taken up into the rare and elevated atmosphere of metaphysics. What if different modes of architecture, or sculpture, or varieties in the practice of such useful arts as weaving and ship-building, be attributed to the same principle that makes a sparrow’s nest different from a hawk’s, or a honey-bee’s from a hornet’s? What if there be different instincts in human art, as there is in the nidification of birds? Whatever may be the fact, it is clear that such a doctrine must modify the interpretation of it. The clue to these complications—and they form a Gordian knot which must be unravelled, and not cut—lies in the cautious induction from what we know to what we do not; from the undoubted differences admitted to exist within undoubtedly related populations, to the greater ones which distinguish more distantly connected groups.

This has been sufficient to indicate the existence of certain moral characters which are really no characters at all—at least in the way of proving descent or affiliation; and that physical ones of the same kind are equally numerous may be inferred from what has already been written.

It is these elements of uncertainty so profusely mixed up with almost all the other classes of ethnological facts, that give such a high value, as an instrument of investigation, to Language; inasmuch as, although two different families of mankind may agree in having skins of the same colour, or hair of the same texture, without, thereby, being connected in the way of relationship, it is hard to conceive how they could agree in calling the same objects by the same name, without a community of origin, or else either direct or indirect intercourse. Affiliation or intercourse—one of the two—this community of language exhibits. One to the exclusion of the other it does not exhibit. If it did so, it would be of greater value than it is. Still it indicates one of the two; and either fact is worth looking for.

The value of language has been overrated; chiefly, of course, by the philologists. And it has been undervalued. The anatomists and archæologists, and, above all, the zoologists, have done this. The historian, too, has not known exactly how to appreciate it, when its phænomena come in collision with the direct testimony of authorities; the chief instrument in his own line of criticism.

It is overrated when we make the affinities of speech between two populations absolute evidence of connection in the way of relationship. It is overrated when we talk of tongues being immutable, and of languages never dying. On the other hand, it is unduly disparaged when an inch or two of difference in stature, a difference in the taste in the fine arts, a modification in the religious belief, or a disproportion in the influence upon the affairs of the world, is set up as a mark of distinction between two tribes speaking one and the same tongue, and alike in other matters. Now, errors of each kind are common.

The permanence of language as a sign of origin must be determined, like every thing else of the same kind, by induction; and this tells us that both the loss and retention of a native tongue are illustrated by remarkable examples. It tells both ways. In St. Domingo we have negroes speaking French; and this is a notable instance of the adoption of a foreign tongue. But the circumstances were peculiar. One tongue was not changed for another; since no Negro language predominated. The real fact was that of a mixture of languages—and this is next to no language at all. Hence, when French became the language of the Haytians, the usual obstacle of a previously existing common native tongue, pertinaciously and patriotically retained, was wanting. It superseded an indefinite and conflicting mass of Negro dialects, rather than any particular Negro language.

In the southern parts of Central America the ethnology is obscure, especially for the Republics of San Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Yet if we turn to Colonel Galindo’s account of them, we find the specific statement that aborigines still exist, and that their language is the Spanish; not any native Indian dialect. As similar assertions respecting the extinction and replacement of original languages have frequently proved incorrect, let us assume this to be an over-statement—though I have no definite grounds for considering it one. Over-statement though it may be, it still shows the direction in which things are going; and that is towards the supremacy of a European tongue.

On the confines of Asia and Europe there is the nation, tribe or family of the Bashkirs. Their present tongue is the Turkish. It is believed, however, that originally it was the mother-tongue of the Majiars of Hungary.

Again, the present Bulgarian is akin to the Russian. Originally, it was a Turk dialect.

Lastly—for I am illustrating, not exhausting, the subject—there died, in the year 1770, at Karczag in Hungary, an old man named Varro; the last man, in Europe, that knew even a few words of the language of his nation. Yet this nation was and is a great one; no less a one than that of the ancient Komanian Turks, some of whom invaded Europe in the eleventh century, penetrated as far as Hungary, settled there as conquerors, and retained their language till the death of this same Varro. The rest of the nation remained in Asia; and the present occupants of the parts between the Caspian and the Aral are their descendants. Languages then may be lost; and one may be superseded by another.

The ancient Etruscans as a separate substantive nation are extinct: so is their language, which we know to have been peculiar. Yet the Etruscan blood still runs in the veins of the Florentine and other Italians.

On the other hand, the pertinacity with which language resists the attempts to supersede it is of no common kind. Without going to Siberia, or America, the great habitats of the broken and fragmentary families, we may find instances much nearer home! In the Isle of Man the native Manks still remains; though dominant Norsemen and dominant Anglo-Saxons have brought their great absorbent languages in collision with it. In Malta, the labourers speak Arabic—with Italian, with English, and with a Lingua Franca around them.

In the western extremities of the Pyrenees, a language neither French nor Spanish is spoken; and has been spoken for centuries—possibly milleniums. It was once the speech of the southern half of France, and of all Spain. This is the Basque of Biscay.

In contact with the Turk on one side, and the Greek and the Slavonic on the other, the Albanian of Albania still speaks his native Skipetar.

A reasonable philologist makes similarity of language strong—very strong—primâ facie evidence in favour of community of descent.

When does it imply this, and when does it merely denote commercial or social intercourse? We can measure the phænomena of languages and exhibit the results numerically. Thus the percentage of words common to two languages may be 1, 2, 3, 4–98, 99, or any intermediate number. But, now comes the application of a maxim. Ponderanda non numeranda. We ask what sort of words coincide, as well as how many? When the names of such objects as fire, water, sun, moon, star, hand, tooth, tongue, foot, &c. agree, we draw an inference very different from the one which arises out of the presence of such words as ennui, fashion, quadrille, violin, &c. Common sense distinguishes the words which are likely to be borrowed from one language into another, from those which were originally common to the two.

There are a certain amount of French words in English, i. e. of words borrowed from the French. I do not know the percentage, nor yet the time required for their introduction; and, as I am illustrating the subject, rather than seeking specific results, this is unimportant. Prolong the time, and multiply the words; remembering that the former can be done indefinitely. Or, instead of doing this, increase the points of contact between the languages. What follows? We soon begin to think of a familiar set of illustrations; some classical and some vulgar—of the Delphic ship so often mended as to retain but an equivocal identity; of the Highlander’s knife, with its two new blades and three new handles; of Sir John Cutler’s silk-stockings degenerated into worsted by darnings. We are brought to the edge of a new question. We must tread slowly accordingly.

In the English words call-est, call-eth (call-s), and call-ed, we have two parts; the first being the root itself, the second a sign of person, or tense. The same is the case with the word father-s, son-s, &c.; except that the -s denotes case; and that it is attached to a substantive, instead of a verb. Again, in wis-er we have the sign of a comparative; in wis-est that of a superlative degree. All these are inflexions. If we choose, we may call them inflexional elements; and it is convenient to do so; since we can then analyse words and contrast the different parts of them: e. g. in call-s the call- is radical, the -s inflexional.

Having become familiarized with this distinction, we may now take a word of French or German origin—say fashion or waltz. Each, of course, is foreign. Nevertheless, when introduced into English, it takes an English inflexion. Hence we say, if I dress absurdly it is fashion’s fault; also, I am waltz-ing, I waltz-ed, he waltz-es—and so on. In these particular words, then, the inflexional part has been English; even when the radical was foreign. This is no isolated fact. On the contrary, it is sufficiently common to be generalized so that the grammatical part of language has been accredited with a permanence which has been denied to the glossarial or vocabular. The one changes, the other is constant; the one is immortal, the other fleeting; the one form, the other matter.

Now it is imaginable that the glossarial and grammatical tests may be at variance. They would be so if all our English verbs came to be French, yet still retained their English inflexions in -ed, -s, -ing, &c. They would be so if all the verbs were like fashion, and all the substantives like quadrille. This is an extreme case. Still, it illustrates the question. Certain Hindu languages are said to have nine-tenths of the vocables common with a language called the Sanskrit—but none of their inflexions; the latter being chiefly Tamul. What, then, is the language itself? This is a question which divides philologists. It illustrates, however, the difference between the two tests—the grammatical and the glossarial. Of these, it is safe to say that the former is the more constant.

Yet the philological method of investigation requires caution. Over and above the terms which one language borrows from another, and which denote intercourse rather than affinity, there are two other classes of little or no ethnological value.

• 1. Coincidences may be merely accidental. The likelihood of their being so is a part of the Doctrine of Chances. The mathematician may investigate this: the philologist merely finds the data. Neither has been done satisfactorily, though it was attempted by Dr. T. Young.
• 2. Coincidences may have an organic connexion. No one would say that because two nations called the same bird by the name cuckoo, the term had been borrowed by either one from the other, or by both from a common source. The true reason would be plain enough. Two populations gave a name on imitative principles, and imitated the same object. Son and brother, sister and daughter—if these terms agree, the chances are that a philological affinity is at the bottom of the agreement. But does the same apply to papa and mama, identical in English, Carib, and perhaps twenty other tongues? No. They merely show that the infants of different countries begin with the same sounds.

Such—and each class is capable of great expansion—are the cases where philology requires caution. Another matter now suggests itself.

To be valid a classification must be real; not nominal or verbal—not a mere book-maker’s arrangement. Families must be in definite degrees of relationship. This, too, will bear illustration. A man wants a relation to leave his money to: he is an Englishman, and by relation means nothing more distant than a third cousin. It is nothing to him if, in Scotland, a fifth cousinship is recognised. He has not found the relation he wants; he has merely found a greater amount of latitude given to the term. Few oversights have done more harm than the neglect of this distinction. Twenty years ago the Sanskrit, Sclavonic, Greek-and-Latin, and Gothic languages formed a class. This class was called Indo-Germanic. Its western limits were in Germany; its eastern in Hindostan. The Celtic of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man was not included in it. Neither was it included in any other group. It was anywhere or nowhere—in any degree of isolation. Dr. Prichard undertook to fix it. He did so—well and successfully. He showed that, so far from being isolated, it was connected with the Greek, German, and Sclavonic by a connexion with the Sanskrit, or (changing the expression) with the Sanskrit through the Sclavonic, German, and Greek—any or all. The mother-tongue from which all these broke was supposed to be in Asia. Dr. Prichard’s work was entitled the ‘Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations.’ Did this make the Celtic Indo-Germanic? It was supposed to do so. Nay, more—it altered the name of the class; which was now called, as it has been since, Indo-European. Inconveniently. A relationship was mistaken for the relationship. The previous tongues were (say) second cousins. The Celtic was a fourth or fifth. What was the result? Not that a new second cousin was found, but that the family circle was enlarged.

What follows? Dr. Prichard’s fixation of the Celtic as a member of even the same clan with the German, &c. was an addition to ethnographical philology that many inferior investigators strove to rival; and it came to be current belief—acted on if not avowed—that tongues as like the Celtic as the Celtic was to the German were Indo-European also. This bid fair to inundate the class—to make it prove too much—to render it no class at all. The Albanian, Basque, Etruscan, Lap, and others followed. The outlier of the group once created served as a nucleus for fresh accumulations. A strange language of Caucasus—the Irôn or Ossetic—was placed by Klaproth as Indo-Germanic; and that upon reasonable grounds, considering the unsettled state of criticism. Meanwhile, the Georgian, another tongue of those same mysterious mountains, wants placing. It has undoubted Ossetic—or Irôn—affinities. But the Ossetic—or Irôn—is Indo-European. So therefore is the Georgian. This is a great feat; since the Caucasian tongues and the Caucasian skulls now agree, both having their affinities with Europe—as they ought to have. But what if both the Irôn and Georgian are half Chinese, or Tibetan, i. e. are all but monosyllabic languages both in grammar and vocables? If such be the case, the term ‘Indo-European’ wants revising; and not only that—the principles on which terms are fixed and classes created want revising also. At the same time, the ‘Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations’ contains the most definite addition to philology that the present century has produced; and the proper compliment to it is Mr. Garnett’s review of it in the ‘Quarterly;’ the first of a series of masterly and unsurpassed specimens of inductive philology applied to the investigation of the true nature of the inflexions of the Verb. But this is episodical.