336SeeIndigenous Races of the Earth, p. 320.337See Strope,Description d’une Momie très-ancienne(Recueil Périod. d’Observ. de Médecine, vol. iv, p. 290, Jan. 1756). One may see in reading the account of a very able and judicious narrator how much ancient scientific observations alter with the times, when no care is taken to refer to the original sources.338See Vivien, in theMémoires de la Société Ethnologique, vol. ii, p. 59.339Portfolio, Philadelphia, 1814.340W. Edwards,Des Caractères Physiologiques des races humaines, p. 45, has especially noticed the great importance of external characteristics; he has only done wrong in excluding the hair, and attending solely to the form of the skull, which never concerns us when we endeavour to picture or recall to our mind the features of a man.341See Michelet, with regard to the paintings in the Sixtine Chapel,Histoire de France, Renaissance.342“Philology is at once the most elevated and the most positive branch of the natural history of the human race.” Chavée,Moïse et les Langues(La Revue). M. Flourens seems to give philological a superior rank to physical characteristics. [See above, p. 77,note.—Editor.]343He believes that by their means we can go back to the most distant geological periods. SeeApophthegms(Edinburgh New Philosophical Journ., vol. li.)344Latham thus explains it: “This is because whilstAandB, in the way of stock-blood or pedigree, will giveCa truetertium quid, or a near approach to it, andAandB, in the way of language, will only give themselves,i. e., they will give no truetertium quid, nor any very close approach to it.”Celtic Nations, p. 33. We have endeavoured to prove that this truetertium quid—thisreal mean term, is never produced as far as species.345[“Either language must have been originally revealed from heaven, or it must be the fruits of human industry. The greater part of Jews and Christians, and even some of the wisest Pagans, have embraced the former opinion, which seems to be supported by the authority of Moses, who represents the Supreme Being as teaching our first parents thenamesof animals. The latter opinion is held by Diodorus Siculus, Lucretius, Horace, and many other Greek and Roman writers, who consider language as one of the arts invented by man. The first men, say they, lived for some time in woods and caves, after the manner of beasts, uttering only confused and indistinct noises, till, associating for mutual assistance, they came by degrees to use articulate sounds mutually agreed upon, for the arbitrary signs or marks of those ideas in the mind of the speaker which he wanted to communicate to the hearer. This opinion sprung from the atomic cosmogony which was framed by Mochus, the Phœnician, and afterwards improved by Democritus and Epicurus; and though it is part of a system in which the first men are represented as having grown out of the earth, like trees and other vegetables, it has been adopted by several modern writers of high rank in the republic of letters, and is certainly in itself worthy of examination.”—Encyclop. Brit., vol. ix, p. 530, 1797.—Editor.]346I do not here mention the opinions of the Swede (see Latham,Celtic Nations, p. 2), who thinks that important changes can be introduced into a language by certain customs of a people, who change, for instance, the lips for the nostrils, and thus substitute nasal for labial consonants. These facts are, perhaps, true in the detail, but they ought not to have much importance, as they do not alter the specific and personal character of the language, which is far from consisting in the relative number of one or two kinds of letters.347Bunsen (Eng. transl.), Niebuhr’sLife and Letters, vol. i, p. 39.348“Languages,” he says, “give but feeble probabilities in Anthropology.”Voyage aux regions Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, vol. iii, p. 352.349See, in theMémoires de la Société Ethnologique(July 1843), a letter in which M. Vivien denies a first rank to language as a distinctive characteristic, and gives it to physical type.350See above, p. 32.351“I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this philological barbarism is permitted me) do not resemble one anotherbecausethey come from the same parent, but because they have been brought up together; Africa especially seems to me to furnish a proof of it, for we must study the history of families of languages, especially in the place where they began to be formed, and I believe that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is not applicable to all cases, but to several; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish, etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death; but many other languages appear to me to take their features one from the other by simple frequentation, by the natives being often in company together, and, as time goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages, like the branches of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not exist.”—Correspondence, 1857.352See above, p. 78.353[Pali, the ordinary language of daily life in Hindoostan at the time when Sanscrit was used in elevated literature alone.—Editor.]354Des Colorations de l’épiderme, 4to, Paris, 1864.355SeeThe Natural History of Man, 1844.356SeeEthnographic Tableau(Indigenous Races of the Earth, London, 1857).357We may quote, as types of genus, two paintings, incomparable in an anthropological point of view,Portrait d’un Nègre;Portrait d’un Oriental, by Herschop (Berlin Museum, Nos. 825 and 827).358M. Flourens, in saying that Buffon collected the accounts of different travellers in order to write hisHistoire des Races, adds, “Whatever they have only seen with the eyes of their body, he sees with the eyes of his mind, and by that means alone he sees better than they can; each of them has seen merely some scattered characteristics,—Buffon sees everything; he links together whatever they may have separated, and separates whatever they have confounded.”—Histoire des Idées de Buffon, p. 167.359“Boni viri nullam oportet esse causam præter veritatem.”360[Yes, but the difficulty is to determine if itistrue. We cannot receiveanythingas true merely because asavantsays it is so. We must go on enquiring in a proper spirit; but we must not put inquiry after truth in the same category with scepticism,—“that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty respecting anything and everything here on earth seems unattainable.” This is the age for seeking after truth; but in how many different ways do men endeavour to attain to it! We must search the past carefully in all its scientific and natural facts, and as Longfellow beautifully says,—“Nor deem the irrevocable past,As wholly wasted, wholly vain,If, rising on its wrecks, at lastTo something nobler we attain.”This is the true aim of all inquiry.—Editor.]
336SeeIndigenous Races of the Earth, p. 320.
337See Strope,Description d’une Momie très-ancienne(Recueil Périod. d’Observ. de Médecine, vol. iv, p. 290, Jan. 1756). One may see in reading the account of a very able and judicious narrator how much ancient scientific observations alter with the times, when no care is taken to refer to the original sources.
338See Vivien, in theMémoires de la Société Ethnologique, vol. ii, p. 59.
339Portfolio, Philadelphia, 1814.
340W. Edwards,Des Caractères Physiologiques des races humaines, p. 45, has especially noticed the great importance of external characteristics; he has only done wrong in excluding the hair, and attending solely to the form of the skull, which never concerns us when we endeavour to picture or recall to our mind the features of a man.
341See Michelet, with regard to the paintings in the Sixtine Chapel,Histoire de France, Renaissance.
342“Philology is at once the most elevated and the most positive branch of the natural history of the human race.” Chavée,Moïse et les Langues(La Revue). M. Flourens seems to give philological a superior rank to physical characteristics. [See above, p. 77,note.—Editor.]
343He believes that by their means we can go back to the most distant geological periods. SeeApophthegms(Edinburgh New Philosophical Journ., vol. li.)
344Latham thus explains it: “This is because whilstAandB, in the way of stock-blood or pedigree, will giveCa truetertium quid, or a near approach to it, andAandB, in the way of language, will only give themselves,i. e., they will give no truetertium quid, nor any very close approach to it.”Celtic Nations, p. 33. We have endeavoured to prove that this truetertium quid—thisreal mean term, is never produced as far as species.
345[“Either language must have been originally revealed from heaven, or it must be the fruits of human industry. The greater part of Jews and Christians, and even some of the wisest Pagans, have embraced the former opinion, which seems to be supported by the authority of Moses, who represents the Supreme Being as teaching our first parents thenamesof animals. The latter opinion is held by Diodorus Siculus, Lucretius, Horace, and many other Greek and Roman writers, who consider language as one of the arts invented by man. The first men, say they, lived for some time in woods and caves, after the manner of beasts, uttering only confused and indistinct noises, till, associating for mutual assistance, they came by degrees to use articulate sounds mutually agreed upon, for the arbitrary signs or marks of those ideas in the mind of the speaker which he wanted to communicate to the hearer. This opinion sprung from the atomic cosmogony which was framed by Mochus, the Phœnician, and afterwards improved by Democritus and Epicurus; and though it is part of a system in which the first men are represented as having grown out of the earth, like trees and other vegetables, it has been adopted by several modern writers of high rank in the republic of letters, and is certainly in itself worthy of examination.”—Encyclop. Brit., vol. ix, p. 530, 1797.—Editor.]
346I do not here mention the opinions of the Swede (see Latham,Celtic Nations, p. 2), who thinks that important changes can be introduced into a language by certain customs of a people, who change, for instance, the lips for the nostrils, and thus substitute nasal for labial consonants. These facts are, perhaps, true in the detail, but they ought not to have much importance, as they do not alter the specific and personal character of the language, which is far from consisting in the relative number of one or two kinds of letters.
347Bunsen (Eng. transl.), Niebuhr’sLife and Letters, vol. i, p. 39.
348“Languages,” he says, “give but feeble probabilities in Anthropology.”Voyage aux regions Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, vol. iii, p. 352.
349See, in theMémoires de la Société Ethnologique(July 1843), a letter in which M. Vivien denies a first rank to language as a distinctive characteristic, and gives it to physical type.
350See above, p. 32.
351“I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this philological barbarism is permitted me) do not resemble one anotherbecausethey come from the same parent, but because they have been brought up together; Africa especially seems to me to furnish a proof of it, for we must study the history of families of languages, especially in the place where they began to be formed, and I believe that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is not applicable to all cases, but to several; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish, etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death; but many other languages appear to me to take their features one from the other by simple frequentation, by the natives being often in company together, and, as time goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages, like the branches of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not exist.”—Correspondence, 1857.
352See above, p. 78.
353[Pali, the ordinary language of daily life in Hindoostan at the time when Sanscrit was used in elevated literature alone.—Editor.]
354Des Colorations de l’épiderme, 4to, Paris, 1864.
355SeeThe Natural History of Man, 1844.
356SeeEthnographic Tableau(Indigenous Races of the Earth, London, 1857).
357We may quote, as types of genus, two paintings, incomparable in an anthropological point of view,Portrait d’un Nègre;Portrait d’un Oriental, by Herschop (Berlin Museum, Nos. 825 and 827).
358M. Flourens, in saying that Buffon collected the accounts of different travellers in order to write hisHistoire des Races, adds, “Whatever they have only seen with the eyes of their body, he sees with the eyes of his mind, and by that means alone he sees better than they can; each of them has seen merely some scattered characteristics,—Buffon sees everything; he links together whatever they may have separated, and separates whatever they have confounded.”—Histoire des Idées de Buffon, p. 167.
359“Boni viri nullam oportet esse causam præter veritatem.”
360[Yes, but the difficulty is to determine if itistrue. We cannot receiveanythingas true merely because asavantsays it is so. We must go on enquiring in a proper spirit; but we must not put inquiry after truth in the same category with scepticism,—“that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty respecting anything and everything here on earth seems unattainable.” This is the age for seeking after truth; but in how many different ways do men endeavour to attain to it! We must search the past carefully in all its scientific and natural facts, and as Longfellow beautifully says,—“Nor deem the irrevocable past,As wholly wasted, wholly vain,If, rising on its wrecks, at lastTo something nobler we attain.”This is the true aim of all inquiry.—Editor.]
“Nor deem the irrevocable past,As wholly wasted, wholly vain,If, rising on its wrecks, at lastTo something nobler we attain.”
“Nor deem the irrevocable past,As wholly wasted, wholly vain,If, rising on its wrecks, at lastTo something nobler we attain.”
“Nor deem the irrevocable past,As wholly wasted, wholly vain,If, rising on its wrecks, at lastTo something nobler we attain.”
“Nor deem the irrevocable past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.”
This is the true aim of all inquiry.—Editor.]