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 VanDiemen’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—prim 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 SirJohn 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.

The next instrument of ethnological criticism is to be found in the phÆnomena themselves of the dispersion and distribution of our species.

First as to its universality. In this respect we must look minutely before we shall find places where Man is not. These, if we find them at all, will come under one of two conditions; the climate will be extreme, or the isolation excessive. For instances of the first we take the Poles; and, as far as the Antarctic Circle is concerned, we find no inhabitants in the ice-bound regions—few and far between—of its neighbourhood; none south of 55°S.lat., or the extremity of the Tierra del Fuego. This, however, is peopled. We must remember, however, that in the Southern Ocean such regions as New South Shetland and Victoria Land are isolated as well as cold and frozen.

The North Pole, however, must be approached within 25° before we lose sight of Man, or find him excluded from even a permanent habitation. Spitzbergen is beyond the limits of human occupancy. Nova Zembla, when first discovered, was also uninhabited. So was Iceland. Here, however, it was the isolation of the island that made it so. A hardy stock of men, nearly related to ourselves, have occupied it since the ninth century; and continental Greenland is peopled as far as the 75thdegree—though, perhaps, only as a summer residence.

Far to the east of Nova Zembla and opposite to the country of the Yukahiri—a hardy people on the rivers Kolyma and Indijirka, and within the Arctic Circle—lies the island of New Siberia. I find from Wrangell’s Travels in Siberia that certain expatriated Yukahiri are believed to have fled thither. Have they lived or died? Have they reached the island? In case they have done so, and kept body and soul together, New Siberia is probably the most northern spot of the inhabited world.

How cold a country must be in order to remain empty of men, we have seen. Such localities are but few. None are too hot—unless, indeed, we believe the centre of Equatorial Africa to be a solitude.

In South America there is a great blank in the Maps. For many degrees on each side of the Upper Amazons lies a vast tract—said to be a jungle—and marked Sirionos, the name of a frontier population. Yet the Sirionos are not, for one moment, supposed to fill up the vast hiatus. At the same time, there are few, or none, besides. Is this tract a drear unhumanized waste? It is said to be so—to be wet, woody, and oppressively malarious. Yet, this merely means that there is a forest and a swamp of a certain magnitude, and of a certain degree of impenetrability.

Other such areas are unexplored—yet we presume them to be occupied; though ever so thinly: e.g. the interiors of New Guinea and Australia.

That Greenland was known to the early Icelanders is well known. And that it was occupied when so first known is also certain. One of the geographical localities mentioned in an old Saga has an Eskimo word for one of its elements—Utibuks-firth= the firth of the isthmus; Utibuk in Eskimo meaning isthmus.

Of the islands originally uninhabited those which are, at one and the same time, large and near continents are Madeira and Iceland—the former being a lonely wood. The Canaries, though smaller and more isolated, have been occupied by the remarkable family of the Guanches. Add to these, Ascension, St.Helena, the Galapagos, Kerguelen’s Island, and a few others.

Easter Island, a speck in the vast Pacific, and more than half way between Asia and America, exhibited both inhabitants and ruins to its first discoverers.

Such is the horizontal distribution of Man; i.e. his distribution according to the degrees of latitude. What other animal has such a range? What species? What genus or order? Contrast with this the localized habitats of the Orang-utan, and the Chimpanzee as species; of the Apes as genera; of the Marsupialia as orders.

The vertical distribution is as wide. By vertical I mean elevation above the level of the sea. On the high table-land of Pamer we have the Kerghiz; summer visitants at least, where the Yak alone, among domesticated animals, lives and breathes in the rarefied atmosphere. The town of Quito is more than 10,000feet above the sea; Walcheren is, perhaps, below the level of it.

Who expects uniformity of physiognomy or frame with such a distribution?

The size of ethnological areas.—Comparatively speaking, Europe is pretty equally divided amongst the European families. The Slavonic populations of Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, Servia, and Russia may, perhaps, have more than their due—still the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Wallachians, all speaking languages of classical origin, have their share; and so has our own Germanic or Gothic family of English, Dutch, Frisians, Bavarians, and Scandinavians. Nevertheless, there are a few families as limited in geographical area as subordinate in political importance. There are the Escaldunac, or Basques,—originally the occupants of all Spain and half France, now pent up in a corner of the Pyrenees—the Welsh of the Iberic Peninsula. There are, also, the Skipetar, or Albanians; wedged in between Greece, Turkey, and Dalmatia. Nevertheless, the respective areas of the European families are pretty equally distributed; and the land of Europe is like a lottery wherein all the prizes are of an appreciable value.

The comparison with Asia verifies this. In immediate contact with the vast Turkish population centred in Independent Tartary, but spread over an area reaching, more or less continuously, from Africa to the Icy Sea (an area larger than the whole of Europe), come the tribes of Caucasus—Georgians, Circassians, Lesgians, Mizjeji, and IrÔn; five well-defined groups, each falling into subordinate divisions, and some of them into subdivisions. The language of Constantinople is understood at the Lena. In the mountain range between the Caspian and the Black Sea, the mutually unintelligible languages are at least fifteen—perhaps more, certainly not fewer. Now, the extent of land covered by the Turk family shows the size to which an ethnological area may attain; whilst the multiplicity of mutually unintelligible tongues of Caucasus shows how closely families may be packed. Their geographical juxtaposition gives prominence to the contrast.

At the first view, this contrast seems remarkable. So far from being so, it is of continual occurrence. In China the language is one and indivisible: on its south-western frontier the tongues are counted by the dozen—just as if in Yorkshire there were but one provincial dialect throughout; two in Lincolnshire; and twenty in Rutland.

The same contrast re-appears in North America. In Canada and the Northern States the Algonkin area is measured by the degrees of latitude and longitude; in Louisiana and Alabama by the mile.

The same in South America. One tongue—the Guarani—covers half the continent. Elsewhere, a tenth part of it contains a score.

The same in Southern Africa. From the Line to the neighbourhood of the Cape all is Kaffre. Between the Gambia and the Gaboon there are more than twenty different divisions.

The same in the North. The Berbers reach from the Valley of the Nile to the Canaries, and from the Mediterranean to the parts about Borneo. In Borneo there are said to be thirty different languages.

Such are areas in size, and in relation to each other; like the bishoprics and curacies of our church, large and small, with a difficulty in ascertaining the average. However, the simple epithets great and small are suggestive; since the former implies an encroaching, the latter a receding population.

A distribution over continents is one thing; a distribution over islands another. The first is easiest made when the world is young and when the previous occupants create no obstacles. The second implies maritime skill and enterprise, and maritime skill improves with the experience of mankind. One of the greatest facts of ethnological distribution and dispersion belongs to this class. All the islands of the Pacific are peopled by the members of one stock, or family—the Polynesian. These we find as far north as the Sandwich Islands, as far south as New Zealand, and in Easter Island half-way between Asia and America. So much for the dispersion. But this is not all: the distribution is as remarkable. Madagascar is an African rather than an Asiatic island; within easy sail of Africa; the exact island for an African population. Yet, ethnologically, it is Asiatic—the same family which we find in Sumatra, Borneo, the Moluccas, the Mariannes, the Carolines, and Polynesia being Malagasi also.

Contrast between contiguous populations.—Ethnological resemblance by no means coincides with geographical contiguity. The general character of the circumpolar families of the Arctic Circle is that of the Laplander, the Samoeid, and the Eskimo. Yet the zone of population that encircles the inhospitable shores of the Polar Sea is not exclusively either Lap or Samoeid—nor yet Eskimo. In Europe, the Laplander finds a contrast on each side. There is the Norwegian on the west; the Finlander on the east. We can explain this. The former is but a recent occupant; not a natural, but an intruder. This we infer from the southern distribution of the other members of his family—who are Danish, German, Dutch, English, and American. For the same reason the Icelander differs from the Greenlander. The Finlander, though more closely allied to the Lap than the Norwegian—belonging to the same great Ugrian family of mankind—is still a southern member of his family; a family whose continuation extends to the Lower Volga, and prolongations of which are found in Hungary. East of the Finlander, the Russian displaces the typically circumpolar Samoeid; whilst at the mouth of the Lena we have the Yakuts—Turk in blood, and tongue, and, to a certain extent, in form also.

In America the circumpolar population is generally Eskimo. Yet at one point, we find even the verge of the Arctic shore occupied by a population of tall, fine-looking athletes, six feet high, well-made, and handsome in countenance. These are the Digothi Indians, called also Loucheux. Their locality is the mouth of the McKenzie River; but their language shows that their origin is further south—i.e. that they are Koluches within the Eskimo area.

In Southern Africa we have the Hottentot in geographical proximity to the Kaffre, yet the contrast between the two is considerable. Similar examples are numerous. What do they denote? Generally, but not always, they denote encroachment and displacement; encroachment which tells us which of the two families has been the stronger, and displacement which has the following effect. It obliterates those intermediate and transitional forms which connect varieties, and so brings the more extreme cases of difference in geographical contact, and in ethnological contrast; hence encroachment, displacement, and the obliteration of transitional forms are terms required for the full application of the phÆnomena of distribution as an instrument of ethnological criticism.

Continuity and isolation.—In Siberia there are two isolated populations—the Yakuts on the Lower Lena, and the Soiot on the Upper Yenesey. The former, as aforesaid, are Turk; but they are surrounded by nations other than Turk. They are cut off from the rest of the stock.

The Soiot in like manner are surrounded by strange populations. Their true relations are the Samoeids of the Icy Sea; but between these two branches of the stock there is a heterogeneous population of Turks and Yeneseians—so-called.

The great Iroquois family of America is separated into two parts—one northern and one southern. Between these lie certain members of the Algonkin class. Like the Soiot, and the Northern Samoeids, the two branches of the Iroquois are separated.

The Majiars of Hungary are wholly enclosed by non-Hungarian populations; and their nearest kinsmen are the Voguls of the Uralian Mountains, far to the north-east of Moscow.

This shows that ethnological areas may be either uninterrupted or interrupted; continuous or discontinuous; unbroken or with isolated fragments; and a little consideration will show, that wherever there is isolation there has been displacement. Whether the land has risen or the sea encroached is another question. We know why the Majiars stand separate from the other Ugrian nations. They intruded themselves into Europe within the historical period, cutting their way with the sword; and the parts between them and their next of kin were never more Majiar than they are at the present moment.

But we know no such thing concerning the Iroquois; and we infer something quite the contrary. We believe that they once held all the country that now separates their two branches, and a great deal more beside. But the Algonkins encroached; partially dispossessing, and partially leaving them in occupation.

In either case, however, there has been displacement; and the displacement is the inference from the discontinuity.

But we must remember that true discontinuity can exist in continents only. The populations of two islands may agree, whilst that of a whole archipelago lying between them may differ. Yet this is no discontinuity; since the sea is an unbroken chain, and the intervening obstacle can be sailed round instead of crossed. The nearest way from the continent of Asia to the Tahitian archipelago—the nearest part of Polynesia—is vi New Guinea, New Ireland, and the New Hebrides. All these islands, however, are inhabited by a different division of the Oceanic population. Does this indicate displacement? No! It merely suggests the Philippines, the Pelews, the Carolines, the Ralik and Radak groups, and the Navigators’ Isles, as the route; and such it almost certainly was.

FOOTNOTE

[10] Mill (vol.ii.), speaking of the allied subject of the Moral History of Man.