Critiques and Addresses Part 9

Without the least desire to depreciate the value of philology as an adjuvant to ethnology, I must venture to doubt, with Rudolphi, Desmoulins, Crawfurd, and others, its t.i.tle to the leading position claimed for it by the writers whom I have just quoted. On the contrary, it seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock, unless philologers are prepared to demonstrate, that no nation can lose its language and acquire that of a distinct nation, without a change of blood corresponding with the change of language. Desmoulins long ago put this argument exceedingly well:--

"Let us imagine the recurrence of one of those slow, or sudden, political revolutions, or say of those secular changes which among different people and at different epochs have annihilated historical monuments and even extinguished tradition. In that case, the evidence, now so clear, that the negroes of Hayti were slaves imported by a French colony, who, by the very effect of the subordination involved in slavery, lost their own diverse languages and adopted that of their masters, would vanish. And metaphysical philosophers, observing the ident.i.ty of Haytian French with that spoken on the sh.o.r.es of the Seine and the Loire, would argue that the men of St. Domingo with woolly heads, black and oily skins, small calves, and slightly bent knees, are of the same race, descended from the same parental stock, as the Frenchmen with silky brown, chestnut, or fair hair, and white skins. For they would say, their languages are more similar than French is to German or Spanish."[1]

[Footnote 1: Desmoulins, "Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines," p.

345. 1826.]

It must not be imagined that the case put by Desmoulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events precisely similar to the transport of a body of Africans to the West India Islands, indeed, cannot have happened among uncivilized races, but similar results have followed the importation of bodies of conquerors among an enslaved people over and over again. There is hardly a country in Europe in which two or more nations speaking widely different tongues have not become intermixed; and there is hardly a language of Europe of which we have any right to think that its structure affords a just indication of the amount of that intermixture.

As Dr. Latham has well said:--

"It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are unimportant. It is by no means so certain that the blood of Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast amount of Kelticism, not found in our tongue, very probably exists in our pedigrees. The ethnology of France is still more complicated.

Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the strength of his language; whilst others make him a Kelt on the strength of certain moral characteristics, combined with the previous Kelticism of the original Gauls. Spanish and Portuguese, as languages, are derivations from the Latin; Spain and Portugal, as countries, are Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab, in different proportions. Italian is modern Latin all the world over; yet surely there must be much Keltic blood in Lombardy, and much Etruscan intermixture in Tuscany.

"In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the Niemen spoke some Slavonic dialect; they now nearly all speak German. Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic than the speech."[1]

[Footnote 1: Latham, "Man and his Migrations," p. 171.]

In other words, what philologer, if he had nothing but the vocabulary and grammar of the French and English languages to guide him, would dream of the real causes of the unlikeness of a Norman to a Provencal, of an Orcadian to a Cornishman? How readily might he be led to suppose that the different climatal conditions to which these speakers of one tongue have so long been exposed, have caused their physical differences; and how little would he suspect that these are due (as we happen to know they are) to wide differences of blood.

Few take duly into account the evidence which exists as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting "Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific," especially remarks upon the "avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;" and he adds that "among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found by us which did not possess, in some cases still imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition to their own, in which they reckon only to five."

Yet how much philological reasoning in favour of the affinity or diversity of two distinct peoples has been based on the mere comparison of numerals!

But the most instructive example of the fallacy which may attach to merely philological reasonings, is that afforded by the Feejeans, who are, physically, so intimately connected with the adjacent Negritos of New Caledonia, &c., that no one can doubt to what stock they belong, and who yet, in the form and substance of their language, are Polynesian. The case is as remarkable as if the Canary Islands should have been found to be inhabited by negroes speaking Arabic, or some other clearly Semitic dialect, as their mother tongue. As it happens, the physical peculiarities of the Feejeans are so striking, and the conditions under which they live are so similar to those of the Polynesians, that no one has ventured to suggest that they are merely modified Polynesians--a suggestion which could otherwise certainly have been made. But if languages may be thus transferred from one stock to another, without any corresponding intermixture of blood, what ethnological value has philology?--what security does unity of language afford us that the speakers of that language may not have sprung from two, or three, or a dozen, distinct sources?

Thus we come, at last, to the purely zoological method, from which it is not unnatural to expect more than from any other, seeing that, after all, the problems of ethnology are simply those which are presented to the zoologist by every widely distributed animal he studies. The father of modern zoology seems to have had no doubt upon this point. At the twenty-eighth page of the standard twelfth edition of the "Systema Naturae," in fact, we find:--

I. PRIMATES.

_Dentes primores incisores: superiores IV. paralleli, mammae pectorales II._

1. h.o.m.o. Nosce te ipsum.

Sapiens. 1. H. diurnus: _varians cultura, loco._ _Ferus_. Tetrapus, mutus, hirsutus.

_America.n.u.s_ [Greek: a]. Rufus, cholericus, rectus--_Pilis_ nigris, rectis, cra.s.sis--_Naribus_ patulis--_Facie_ ephelitica: _Mento_ subimberbi.

_Pertinax_, contentus, liber. _Pingit_ se lineis daedaleis rubris.

_Regitur_ Consuetudine.

_Europaeus_ [Greek: b]. Albus sauguineus torosus. _Pilis_ flavescentibus, prolixis.

_Oculis_ caeruleis.

_Levis_, argutus, inventor.

_Tegitur_ Vestimentis arctis.

_Regitur_ Ritibus.

_Asiaticus_ [Greek: g]. Luridus, melancholicus, rigidus.

_Pilis_ nigricantibus. _Oculis_ fuscis. _Severus_, fastuosus, avarus.

_Tegitur_ Indumentis laxis.

_Regitur_ Opinionibus.

_Afer_ [Greek: d]. Niger, phlegmaticus, laxus. _Pilis_ atris, contortuplicatis. _Cute_ holosericea.

_Naso_ simo. _Labiis_ tumidis.

_Feminis_ sinus pudoris.

_Mammae_ lactantes prolixae.

_Vafer_, segnis, negligens. _Ungit_ se pingui. _Regitur_ Arbitrio.

_Monstrosus_ [Greek: e]. Solo (a) et arte (b c) variat.: a. _Alpini_ parvi, agiles, timidi.

_Patagonici_ magni, segnes.

b. _Monorchides_ ut minus fertiles: Hottentotti.

_Junceae_ puellae, abdomine attenuato: Europoeae.

c. _Macrocephali_ capiti conico: Chinenses.

_Plagiocephali_ capite antice compresso: Canadenses.

Turn a few pages further on in the same volume, and there appears, with a fine impartiality in the distribution of capitals and sub-divisional headings:--

III. FERAE.

_Dentes primores superiores s.e.x, acutiusculi. Canini solitarii._

12. CANIS. _Dentes primores_ superiores VI.: laterales longiores distantes: intermedii lobati.

Inferiores VI.: laterales lobati.

_Laniarii_ solitarii, incurvati.

Molares VI. s. VII. (pluresve quam in reliquis).

_familiaris_ [Greek: i]. C. cauda (sinistrorsum) recurvata....

_domesticus_ [Greek: a]. auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata.

_sagax_ [Greek: b]. auriculis pendulis, digito spurio ad tibias posticas.

_grajus_ [Greek: g]. magnitudine lupi, trunco curvato, rostro attenuato, &c. &c.

Linnaeus' definition of what he considers to be mere varieties of the species Man are, it will be observed, as completely free from any allusion to linguistic peculiarities as those brief and pregnant sentences in which he sketches the characters of the varieties of the species Dog. "Pilis nigris, naribus patulis" may be set against "auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata;" while the remarks on the morals and manners of the human subject seem as if they were thrown in merely by way of makeweight.

Buffon, Blumenbach (the founder of ethnology as a special science), Rudolphi, Bory de St. Vincent, Desmoulins, Cuvier, Retzius, indeed I may say all the naturalists proper, have dealt with man from a no less completely zoological point of view; while, as might have been expected, those who have been least naturalists, and most linguists, have most neglected the zoological method, the neglect culminating in those who have been altogether devoid of acquaintance with anatomy.

Prichard's proposition, that language is more persistent than physical characters, is one which has never been proved, and indeed admits of no proof, seeing that the records of language do not extend so far as those of physical characters. But, until the superior tenacity of linguistic over physical peculiarities is shown, and until the abundant evidence which exists, that the language of a people may change without corresponding physical change in that people, is shown to be valueless, it is plain that the zoological court of appeal is the highest for the ethnologist, and that no evidence can be set against that derived from physical characters.

What, then, will a new survey of mankind from the Linnaean point of view teach us?

The great antipodal block of land we call Australia has, speaking roughly, the form of a vast quadrangle, 2,000 miles on the side, and extends from the hottest tropical, to the middle of the temperate, zone. Setting aside the foreign colonists introduced within the last century, it is inhabited by people no less remarkable for the uniformity, than for the singularity, of their physical characters and social state. For the most part of fair stature, erect and well built, except for an unusual slenderness of the lower limbs, the AUSTRALIANS have dark, usually chocolate-coloured skins; fine dark wavy hair; dark eyes, overhung by beetle brows; coa.r.s.e, projecting jaws; broad and dilated, but not especially flattened, noses; and lips which, though prominent, are eminently flexible.