  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— If the inhabited world were one large circular island; if its population were admitted to have been diffused over its surface from some single point; and if that single point were at one and the same time unascertained and requiring investigation, what would be the method of our inquiries? I suppose that both history and tradition are silent, and that the absence of other data of the same kind force us upon the general probabilities of the case, and a large amount of À priori argument. We should ask what point would give us the existing phÆnomena with the least amount of migration; and we should ask this upon the simple In the earth as it is, we can do something of the same kind; taking six extreme points as our starting-places, and investigating the extent to which they converge. These six points are the following:—
From these we work through America, Australia, Polynesia, Africa, and Europe, to Asia—some part of which gives us our conventional, provisional, and hypothetical centre. I. From Tierra del Fuego to the north-eastern parts of Asia.—The Fuegians of the island have so rarely been separated from the Patagonians of the continent that there are no recognised elements of uncertainty in this quarter, distant as it is. Maritime habits connect them with their northern neighbours on the west; and that long labyrinth of archipelagoes which runs up to the southern border of Chili is equally Fuegian and Patagonian. Here we are reminded of the habits of some of the Malay tribes, under a very different sky, and amongst the islets about Sincapore—of the Bajows, or sea-gipsies, boatmen whose home is on the water, and as unfixed as that element; wanderers from one group to another; fishermen rather than traders; not strong-handed enough to be pirates, and not industrious enough to be cultivators. Such skill as the Fuegian shows at all, he shows In size they fall short of the continental Patagonians; in colour and physical conformation they approach them very closely. The same broad and flattened face occurs in both, reminding some writers of the Eskimo, others of the Chinuk. Their language is certainly referable to the Patagonian class, though, probably, unintelligible to a Patagonian. Within the island itself there are differences; degrees of discomfort; and degrees in its effects upon the bodily frame. At the eastern extremity Not so their nearest kinsmen. They are all horsemen; and in their more northern localities the most formidable ones in the world—Patagonians Except in the impracticable heights of the Andes of Chili, and, as suggested above, in the island of Tierra del Fuego, the same equestrian habits characterize all these populations; and, one and all, the same indomitable and savage independence. Of the Chaco Indians, the Tonocote are partially settled, and imperfectly Christianized; but the Abiponians—very Centaurs in their passionate equestrianism—the Mbocobis, the Mataguayos, and others, are the dread of the Spaniards at the present moment. The resistance of the Araucanians of Chili has given an epic Of the Charruas every man was a warrior; self-relying, strong, and cruel; with his hand against the Spaniard, and with his hand against the other aborigines. Many of these they exterminated, and, too proud to enter into confederations, always fought single-handed. In 1831, the President of Uraguay ordered their total destruction, and they Minus the Fuegians, this division is pre-eminently natural; yet the Fuegians cannot be disconnected from it. As a proof of the physical differences being small, I will add the description of a naturalist—D’Orbigny—who separates them. They evidently lie within a small compass.
D’Orbigny is a writer by no means inclined to undervalue differences. Nevertheless he places the Peruvians and the Araucanians in the same primary division. This shows that, if other characters connect them, there is nothing very conclusive in the way of physiognomy against their relationship. I think that certain other characters do connect them—language most especially. At the same time, there is no denying important contrasts. Nevertheless, an unequivocally allied population of the Peruvian stock takes us from 28°S.lat. to the Equator. Its unity within itself is undoubted; and its contrast with the next nearest Of all the populations of the world, the Peruvian is the most vertical in its direction. Its line is due north and south; its breadth but narrow. The Pacific is at one side, and the Andes at the other. One is well-nigh as definite a limit as the other. When we cross the Cordilleras the Peruvian type has changed. The Peruvians lie between the Tropics. They cross the Equator. One of their Republics—Ecuador—even takes its name from its meridian. But they are also mountaineers; and, though their sun is that of Africa, their soil is that of the Himalaya. Hence, their locality presents a conflict, balance, or antagonism of climatologic influences; and the degrees of altitude are opposed to those of latitude. Again, their line of migration is at a right angle with their Equatorial parallel—that is, if we assume them to have come from North America. The bearing of this is as follows:—The town of Quito is about as far from Mexico due north, as it is from French Guiana due west. Now if we suppose the line of migration to have reached Peru from the latter country, the great-great-ancestors of the Peruvians would be people as It is Peru where the ancient sepulchral remains have complicated ethnology. The skulls from ancient burial-places are preternaturally flattened. Consider this natural; and you have a fair reason for the recognition of a fresh species of the genus Homo. But is it legitimate to do so? I think not. That the practice of flattening the head of infants was a custom once as rife and common in Peru as it is in many other parts of both North and South America at the present day, is well known. Then why not account for the ancient flattening thus? I hold that the writers who Two stocks of vast magnitude take up so large a proportion of South America, that though they are not in immediate geographical contact with the Peruvians, they require to be mentioned next in order here. They are mentioned now in order to enable us to treat of other and smaller families. These two great stocks are the Guarani and the Carib; whilst the classes immediately under notice are— The remaining South Americans who are neither Carib nor Guarani.—This division is artificial; being based upon a negative character; and it is geographical rather than ethnological. The first branch of it is that which D’Orbigny calls Antisian, and which he connects at once with the Peruvians Proper; both being members of that primary division to which he referred the Araucanians—the Araucanians being the third branch of the Ando-Peruvians; the two others being the—
The YuracarÉs, MocÉtÉnÈs, Tacanas, Maropas, and Apolistas, are Antisien; and their locality is the eastern slopes of the Andes To the west of the Antisians lie the Indians of the Missions of Chiquito and Moxos, so called because they have been settled and Christianized. The physical characters of these also are D’Orbigny’s. The division, however, he places in the same group with the Patagonians.
And now we are on the great water-system of The tribes of the Orinoco form the last section of Indians, which are neither Guarani nor Caribs; The Guarani alone cover more land than all the other tribes between the Amazons, the Andes, and the La Plata put together: but it is not certain that their area is continuous. In the Bolivian province of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and in contact with the Indians of the Missions and the Chaco, we find the Chiriguanos and Guarayos—and these are Guarani. Then as far north as the equator, and as far as the river Napo on the Peruvian frontier, we find the flat-head Omaguas, the fluviatile mariners (so to say) of the Amazons; and these are Guarani as well. The bulk, however, of the stock is Brazilian; indeed, Brazilian and Guarani have been sometimes used as synonyms. There are, however, other Guarani in Buenos Ayres; there are Guarani on the boundaries of Guiana; and there are Guarani at the foot of the Andes. But amidst the great sea of the Guarani populations, fragments of other families stand out like islands; and this makes it likely that the family in question has been aggressive and intrusive, has effected displacements, and has superseded a number of transitional varieties. The Caribs approach, without equalling, the Guarani, in the magnitude of their area. This In some of the Brazilian tribes, the oblique eye of the Chinese and Mongolians occurs. In order to show the extent to which a multiplicity of small families may not only exist, but exist in the neighbourhood of great ethnological areas, I will enumerate those tribes of the Missions, Brazil, Guiana, and Venezuela, for which vocabularies have been examined, and whereof the languages are believed, either from the comparison of specimens, or on the strength of direct evidence, to be mutually unintelligible; premising that differences are more likely to be exaggerated than undervalued, and that the number of tribes not known in respect to their languages is probably as great again as that of the known ones. A. Between the Andes, the Missions, and the 15' and 17'S.L. come the Yurakares; whose language is said to differ from that of the MocÉtÉnÈs, Tacana, and Apolistas, as much as these differ amongst themselves. B. In the Missions come—1.The Moxos. 2.The Movima. 3.The Cayuvava. 4.The C. In Brazil, the tribes, other than Guarani, of which I have seen vocabularies representing mutually unintelligible tongues, are—
D. Of French, Spanish, and Dutch Guiana I know but little. Upon British Guiana a bright light has been thrown by the researches of Sir
E. Venezuela means the water-system of Orinoco, and here we have the mutually unintelligible tongues of—
The Ottomaka.—These are the dirt-eaters. They fill their stomach with an unctuous clay, found in their country; and that, whether food of a better sort be abundant or deficient. There is plenty of difference here; still where there is difference in some points there is so often agreement in others that no very decided difficulties are currently recognized as lying against the doctrine of the South Americans being specifically connected. When such occur, they are generally inferences from either the superior civilization of the ancient Peruvians or from the peculiarity of their skulls. The latter has been considered. The former seems to be nothing different in kind from that of several other American families—the Muysca of New Grenada, the Mexican, and the Maya further northwards. But this may prove too much; since it may merely be a reason for isolating the Mexicans, &c. Be it so. The question can stand over for the present. Something has now been seen of two classes of phÆnomena which will appear and re-appear in the sequel—viz. the great difference in the physical conditions of such areas as the Fuegian, the Pampa, the Peruvian, and the Warows, and the contrast between the geographical extension of such vast groups as the Guarani, and small families like the Wapisiana, the Yurakares, and more than twenty others. There is a great gap between South and Central America: nor is it safe to say that the line of the Andes (or the Isthmus of Darien) gives the only line of migration. The islands that connect Florida and the Caraccas must be remembered also. The natives of New Grenada are but imperfectly known. In Veragua a few small tribes have been described. In Costa Rica there are still Indians—but they speak, either wholly or generally, Spanish. The same is, probably, the case in Nicaragua. The Moskito Indians are dashed with both negro and white blood, and are Anglicized in respect to their civilization—such as it is. Of the West Indian Islanders none remain but the dark-coloured Caribs of St.Vincents. In Guatimala, Peruvianism re-appears; and architectural remains testify an industrial development—agriculture, and life in towns. The intertropical Andes have an Art of their own; essentially the Mexico, like Peru, has been isolated—and that on the same principle. Yet the Ægyptians of the New World cannot be shown to have exclusively belonged to any one branch of its population. In Guatimala and Yucatan—where the ruins are not inferior to those of the Astek Architecture, cities, and the consolidation of empire which they determine, keep along the line of the Andes. They also stand in an evident ratio In an alluvial soil the barrow replaces the pyramid. The vast sepulchral mounds of the Valley of the Mississippi are the subjects of one of the valuable works The Natchez, known to the novelist from the romance of Chateaubriand, are known to the ethnologist as pre-eminent amongst the Indians of the Mississippi for their Mexican characteristics. They flattened the head, worshiped the sun, kept up an undying fire, recognized a system of caste, and sacrificed human victims. Yet to identify them The other generalities of North America are those of Brazil, Peru, and Patagonia repeated. The Algonkins have an area like the Guarani, their coast-line only extending from Labrador to Cape Hatteras. The Iroquois of New York and the Carolinas—a broken and discontinuous population—indicate encroachment and displacement; they once, however, covered perhaps as much space as the Caribs. The Sioux represent the Chaco and Pampa tribes. Their country is a hunting-ground, with its relations to the northern Tropic and the Arctic Circle, precisely those of the Chaco and Pampas to the Southern and Antarctic. The western side of the Rocky Mountains is more Mexican than the eastern; just as Chili is more Peruvian than Brazil. I believe that if the Pacific coast of America had been the one first discovered and fullest described, so that Russian America, New Caledonia, Queen Charlotte’s Archipelago, and Nutka Sound, The reason for all this lies in the following fact. The Eskimo, who form the only family common to the Old and the New World, stand in a remarkable contrast to the unequivocal and admitted American aborigines of Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada, the New England States, New York, and the other well-known Indians in general. The lines of separation between the Eskimo and the non-Eskimo Americans are as faint on the Pacific, as they are strong on the Atlantic side of the continent. What accounts for this? The phÆnomenon is by no means rare. The Laplander, strongly contrasted with the Norwegian on the west, graduates into the Finlander on the east. The relation of the Hottentot to the Kaffre has been already noticed. So has the hypothesis that explains it. One stock has encroached upon another, and the transitional forms have been displaced. In the particular case before us, the encroaching Just as the Eskimo graduate in the American Indian, so do they pass into the populations of North-eastern Asia—language being the instrument which the present writer has more especially employed in their affiliation. From the Peninsula of Aliaska to the Aleutian chain of islands, and from the Aleutian chain to Kamskatka is the probable course of the migration from Asia to America—traced backwards, i.e. from the goal to the starting-point, from the circumference to the centre. Then come two conflicting lines. The Aleutians may have been either Kamskadales or Curile Islanders. In either language there is a sufficiency of vocables to justify either notion. But this is a mere point of minute ethnology when compared with the broader one which has just preceded it. II. From VanDiemen’s Land to the South-Eastern parts of Asia.—The aborigines of VanDiemen’s Land, conveniently called Tasmanians, have a fair claim, when considered by themselves, to be looked upon as members of a separate species. The Australians are on a level low enough to satisfy the most exaggerated painters of a state of nature; but the Tasmanians are, apparently, lower still. Of this family but a few families remain—occupants of Flinders’ Island, whither they have been removed by the VanDiemen’s Land Government. And here they decrease; but whether from want of room or from intermarriage is doubtful. The effects of neither have been fairly investigated. From the Australians they differ in the texture of their hair—the leading diagnostic character. The Tasmanian is shock-headed, with curled, frizzy, matted and greased locks. None of their dialects are intelligible to any Australian, and the commercial intercourse It is an open question whether the Tasmanians reached VanDiemen’s Land from South Australia, from Timor, or from New Caledonia—the line of migration having, in this latter case, wound round Australia, instead of stretching across it. Certain points of resemblance between the New Caledonian and Tasmanian dialects suggest this refinement upon the prim facie doctrine of an Australian origin; and the texture of the hair, as far as it proves anything, goes the same way. Australia is radically and fundamentally the occupancy of a single stock; the greatest sign of difference between its numerous tribes being that of language. Now this is but a repetition of the philological phÆnomena of America. The blacker and ruder population of Timor represents the great-great ancestors of the Australians; and it was from Timor that Australia was, apparently, peopled. I feel but little doubt on the subject. Timor itself is connected with the Malayan peninsula by a line of dark-coloured, rude, and fragmentary populations, to be found in Ombay and It is in the Malayan peninsula that another line of migration terminates. From New Caledonia to New Guinea a long line of islands—Tanna, Mallicollo, Solomon’s Isles, &c.—is occupied by a dark-skinned population of rude Papuas, with Tasmanian rather than Australian hair, i.e. with hair which is frizzy, crisp, curled, or mop-headed, rather than straight, lank, or only wavy. This comes from New Guinea; New Guinea itself comes from the Eastern Moluccas; i.e. from their darker populations. These are of the same origin with those of Timor; though the lines of migration are remarkably distinct. One is from the Moluccas to New Caledonia vi New Guinea; the other is vi Timor to Australia. Both these migrations were early; earlier than the occupancy of Polynesia. The previous occupancy of Australia and New Guinea proves this; and the greater differences between the different sections of the two populations do the same. III. From Easter Island to the South-Eastern parts of Asia.—The northern, southern, and eastern extremities of Polynesia are the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, and Easter Island respectively. As the languages, both of Polynesia and Micronesia, differ from each other far less than those of New Guinea, the Papuan Islands, and Australia, the separation from the parent stock is later. It is, most probably, through the Philippines that this third line converges towards the original and continental source of all three. This is the south-eastern portion of the Asiatic Continent, or the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. The Malay of the Malayan Peninsula is an inflected tongue as opposed to the Siamese of Siam, which belongs to the same class as the Chinese, and is monosyllabic. This gives us a convenient point to stop at. In like manner the Corean and Japanese tongues, with which we broke off the American line of migration, were polysyllabic; though the Chinese, The most remarkable fact connected with the Oceanic stock is the presence of a certain number of Malay and Polynesian words in the language of an island so distant as Madagascar; an island not only distant from the Malayan Peninsula, but near to the Mozambique coast of Africa—an ethnological area widely different from the Malay. Whatever may be the inference from this fact—and it is one upon which many very conflicting opinions have been founded—its reality is undoubted. It is admitted by Mr.Crawfurd, the writer above all others who is indisposed to admit the Oceanic origin of the Malagasi, and it is accounted for as follows:—“A navigation of 3000miles of open sea lies between them As a supplement to the remarks of Mr.Crawfurd, I add the following account from Mr.M. Martin:—“Many instances have occurred of the slaves in Mauritius seizing on a canoe, or boat, at night-time, and with a calabash of water and a few manioc, or Cassada roots, pushing out to sea and endeavouring to reach across to Madagascar or Africa, through the pathless and stormy ocean. Of course they generally perish, but some succeed. We picked up a frail canoe within about a hundred miles of the coast of Africa; it contained five runaway slaves, one dying in the bottom of the canoe, and the others nearly exhausted. They had fled from a harsh French master at the Seychelles, committed themselves to the deep without compass or guide, with a small quantity of water and rice, and trusting to their fishing-lines for support. Steering by the stars, they had nearly reached the coast from which they had been kidnapped, when nature sank exhausted, and we were just in time to save four of their lives. So long as the wanderers in search of home were able to do so, the days were These extracts have been given for the sake of throwing light upon the most remarkable Oceanic migration known—for migration there must have been, even if it were so partial as Mr.Crawfurd makes it; migration which may make the present Malagasi Oceanic or not, according to the state in which they found the island at their arrival. If it were already peopled, the passage across the great Indian Ocean is just as remarkable as if it were, till then, untrodden by a human foot. The only additional wonder in this latter case would be the contrast between the Africans who missed an island so near, and the Malays who discovered one so distant. Individually, I differ from Mr.Crawfurd in respect to the actual differences between the Malay and the Malagasi, with the hesitation and respect due to his known acquirements in the former of these languages; but I differ more and more unhesitatingly from him in the valuation of them as signs of ethnological separation; believing, not only that the two languages are essentially of the same family, but that the descent, blood, or pedigree of the Malagasi is as Oceanic as their language. IV. From the Cape of Good Hope to the South-western parts of Asia.—The Hottentots of the Cape have a better claim than any other members of the human kind to be considered as a separate species. Characteristics apparently differential occur on all sides. Morally, the Hottentots are rude; physically, they are undersized and weak. In all the points wherein the Eskimo differs from the Algonkin, or the Lap from the Fin, the Hottentot recedes from the Kaffre. Yet the Kaffre is his nearest neighbour. To the ordinary distinctions, steatomata on the nates and peculiarities in the reproductive organs have been superadded. Nevertheless, a very scanty collation gives the following philological similarities; the Hottentot dialects
Unless we suppose Southern Africa to have been the cradle of the human species, the population of the Cape must have been an extension of that of the Southern Tropic, and the Tropical family itself have been originally Equatorial. What does this imply? Even this—that those streams of population upon which the soil, climate, and other physical influences of South Africa acted, had themselves been acted on by the intertropical and equatorial influences of the Negro countries. Hence the human stock upon which the physical conditions had to act, was as peculiar as those conditions themselves. It was not in the same predicament with the intertropical South Americans. Between these and the hypothetical centre in Asia there was the Arctic Circle and the Polar latitudes—influences that in some portion of the line of migration must have acted on their ancestors’ ancestors. It was nearer the condition of the Australians. Yet the equatorial portion of the line of migration Between the Hottentots and their next neighbours to the north there are many points of difference. Admitting these to a certain extent, I explain them by the assumption of encroachment, displacement, and the abolition of those intermediate and transitional tribes which connected the northern Hottentots with the southern Kaffres. And here I must remark, that the displacement itself is no assumption at all, but an historical fact; since within the last few centuries the Amakosa Kaffres alone have extended themselves at the expense of different Hottentot tribes, from the parts about Port Natal to the head-waters of the Orange River. It is only the transitional character of the annihilated populations that is an assumption. I believe it—of course—to be a legitimate one; otherwise it would not have been made. On the other hand I consider it illegitimate to assume, without inquiry, so broad and fundamental a distinction between the two stocks as to It is found in one Kaffre dialect. What are the inferences? That it has been adopted from the Hottentot by the Kaffre; just as a Kaffre gun has been adopted from the Europeans. This is one of them. The other is that the sound in question is less unique, less characteristic, and less exclusively Hottentot than was previously believed. Now this is certainly not one whit less legitimate than the former; yet the former is the commoner notion. Perhaps it is because it flatters us with a fresh fact, instead of chastening us by the correction of an over-hasty generalization. Again—the root t-k (as in tixo, tixme, utiko) is The Kaffre area is so large that it extends on both sides of Africa to the equator; and the contrast which it supplies when compared with the small one of the Hottentots is a repetition of the contrasts already noticed in America. The peculiarities of the Kaffre stock are fully sufficient to justify care and consideration before we place them in the same class either with the true Negros, or with the Gallas, Nubians, Agows, and other Africans of the water-system of the Nile. Yet they are by no means of that broad and trenchant kind which many have fancied them. The undoubted Kaffre character of the languages of Angola, Loango, the Gaboon, the Mozambique and Zanzibar coasts is a fact which must run through all our criticism. If so, it condemns all those extreme inferences which are drawn from the equally undoubted peculiarities of the Kaffres of the Cape. And why? Because these last are extreme forms; extreme, rather than either typical, or—what is more important—transitional. Let us, however, look to them. What find we Even in respect to the languages, there are transitional dialects in abundance. In Mrs.Kilham’s tables of 31 African languages, the last is a Kongo vocabulary, all the rest being Negro. Now this Kongo vocabulary, which is truly Kaffre, differs from the rest so little more than the rest do from each other, that when I first saw the list, being then strongly prepossessed by the opinion that the Kaffre stock of tongues was, to a great extent, a stock per se, I could scarcely believe that the true Kongo and Kaffre language was represented; so I satisfied myself that it was so, by a collation with other undoubted vocabularies, before I admitted the inference. And this is only one fact out of many Again—the Negros themselves are referable to an extreme rather than a normal type; and so far are they from being co-extensive with the Africans, that it is almost exclusively along the From whatever other Africans the Negros are to be separated, they are not to be disconnected from the Kaffres, the chief points of contact and transition being the parts about the Gaboon. Neither are the Kaffres to be too trenchantly cut off from the remarkable families of the Sahara, the range of Atlas, and the coasts of the Mediterranean—families which it is convenient to take next in order; not because this is the sequence which most closely suits either their geography or their ethnology, but because the criticism which has lately been applied to them best helps us in the criticism of the present affiliations. On the confines of Egypt, in the oasis of Siwah, we find the most eastern members of the great Berber, Amazirgh, or Kabyle family; and we find them as far west as the Canary Isles, of which Let us take a language in its first state of inflection, when passing from the monosyllabic form of the Chinese and its allied tongues, it just begins to incorporate with its hitherto unmodified nouns and verbs, certain prepositions denoting relation, certain adverbs denoting time, and certain pronouns of person or possession; by means of all which it gets equivalents to the cases, tenses and persons of the more advanced forms of speech. This is the germ of Conjugation and Declension; of the Accidents of Grammar. Let us, however, go farther. Over and above the simple juxtaposition and incipient incorporation of these previously separable and independent particles, let there be certain internal ones; those, for instance, which convert the English Present Tenses fall and speak into the Preterites fell and spoke—or something of the same sort. Farther still. Let such changes of accent as The union of such processes as these will undoubtedly stamp a remarkable character upon the language in which they appear. But what if they go farther? or what, if without actually going farther, the tongues which they characterize find expositors who delight in giving them prominence, and also exaggerate their import? This is no hypothetical case. A large proportion of roots almost necessarily contain three consonants: e.g. bread, stone, &c., pronounced bred, stÔn, &c. This is one fact. In many languages there is an inability to pronounce two consonants belonging to the same syllable, in immediate succession; an inability which is met by the insertion of an intervening vowel. The Finlander, instead of Krist, must say either Ekristo or Keristo. This principle, in English, would convert bred into bered or ebred, and stÔn into estÔn or setÔn. This is another fact. These two and the preceding ones should now be combined. A large proportion of roots containing three consonants may induce a grammarian to coin such a term as triliteralism, and to say that this triliteralism characterizes a certain language. Then, as not only these consonants are separated from one another by intervening vowels, But the force of system does not stop here. Suppose we wished to establish the paradox that the English was a language of the sort in question. A little ingenuity would put us up to some clever legerdemain. The convenient aspirate h—like the bat in the fable of the birds and beasts at war—might be a consonant when it was wanted to make up the complement of three, and a vowel when it was de trop. Words like pity might be made triliteral (triconsonantal) by doubling the tt; words like pitted, by ejecting it. Lastly, if it were denied that two consonants must necessarily be separated by a vowel, it would be an easy matter to say that between such sounds as the n and r in Henry, the b and r in bread, the r and b in curb, there was really a very short vowel; and that Now let all this be taught and believed, and who will not isolate the language in which such remarkable phenomena occur? All this is taught and believed, and consequently there is a language, or rather a group of languages, thus isolated. But the isolation does not stop with the philologist. The anatomist and the historian support it as well. The nations who speak the language in question are in the neighbourhood of Blacks, but without being Blacks themselves; and they are in contact with rude Pagans; themselves being eminently monotheistic. Their history also has been an influential one, morally and materially as well; whilst the skulls are as symmetrical as the skull of the famous Georgian female of our first chapter, their complexions fair or ruddy, and their noses so little African as to emulate the eagle’s beak in prominent convexity. All this exaggerates the elements of isolation. The class or family thus isolated, which—as stated above—has a real existence, has been conveniently called Semitic; a term comprising the twelve tribes of Israel and the modern Jews so far as they are descended from them, the Syrians Further facts, real or supposed, have contributed to isolate this remarkable and important family. The Africans who were nearest to them, both in locality and civilization—the Ægyptians of the Pharaohnic empire, builders of the pyramids, and writers in hieroglyphics—have ceased to exist as a separate substantive nation. Their Asiatic frontagers, on the other hand, were either Persians or Armenians. Everything favoured isolation here. The Jew and Ægyptian were in strong contrast from the beginning, and all our earliest impressions are in favour of an over-valuation of their differences. As for the Persian, he was so early placed in a different class—a class which, from the fact of its being supposed to contain the Germans, Greeks, Latins, Slavonians, and Hindus as well, has been called Indo-European—that he had a proper and peculiar position of his own; and something almost as stringent in the way of demarcation applied to the Armenian. Where, then, were the approaches to the Semitic family to be found? Attempts were made to connect them with the Indo-Europeans; I think unsuccessfully. Of Consciously or unconsciously, most writers have gone on this hypothesis—naturally, but inconsiderately. Hence the rough current opinion has been, that if the Semitic tribes were in any traceable degree of relationship with the other families of the earth, that relationship must be sought for amongst the Indo-Europeans. The next step was to raise the Semitic class to the rank of a standard or measure for the affinities of unplaced families; and writers who investigated particular languages more readily inquired whether such languages were Semitic, than what the Semitic tongues were themselves. Unless I mistake the spirit in which many admirable investigations have been conducted, this led to the term Sub-Semitic. Men asked about the amount of Semitism in certain families as if it were a substantive and inherent property, rather than what Semitism itself consisted in. And now Sub-Semitic tongues multiplied; since Sub-Semitism was a respectable thing to predicate of the object of one’s attention. The ancient Ægyptian was stated to be Sub-Semitic—Benfey and others having done good work in making it so. Mr. Newman did the same with the Berber. Meanwhile the anatomists acted much like the philologists, and brought the skulls of the old Ægyptians in the same class with those of the Jews and Arabs, so as to be Caucasian. But the Caucasians had been put in a sort of antithesis to the Negros; and hence came mischief. Whatever may be the views of those able writers who have investigated the Sub-Semitic Africans, when pressed for definitions, it is not too much to say that, in practice, they have all acted as if the moment a class became Semitic, it ceased to be African. They have all looked one way; that being the way in which good Jews and Mahometans look—towards Mecca and Jerusalem. They have forgotten the phÆnomena of correlation. If CÆsar is like Pompey, Pompey must be like CÆsar. If African languages approach the Hebrew, the Hebrew must approach them. The attraction is mutual; and it is by no means a case of Mahomet and the mountain. I believe that the Semitic elements of the Berber, In the languages of Abyssinia, the Gheez and TigrÉ, admitted, as long as they have been known at all, to be Semitic, graduate through the Amharic, the Falasha, the Harargi, the Gafat, and other languages which may be well studied in Dr.Beke’s valuable comparative tables But unequivocal as may be the Semitic elements of the Berber, Coptic and Galla, their affinities with the tongues of Western and Southern Africa are more so. I weigh my words when I say, not equally, but more. Changing the expression for every foot in advance which can be made towards the Semitic tongues in one direction, the African philologist can go a yard towards the Negro ones in the other Of course, the proofs of all this in full detail would fill a large volume; indeed, the exhaustion of the subject and the annihilation of all possible and contingent objections would fill many. The position, however, of the present writer is not so much that of the engineer who has to force his water up to a higher uphill by means of pumps, as it is that of the digger and delver who merely clears away artificial embankments which have hitherto prevented it finding its own level according to the common laws of nature. He has little fear from the results of separate and independent investigation, when a certain amount of preconceived notions have been unsettled. To proceed with the subject—the convergence of the lines of migration in Africa is broken or unbroken, clear or indistinct, continuous or irregular, to much the same extent, and much in a similar manner, with those of America. The moral contrasts which were afforded by the Mexicans and Peruvians reappear in the case of the Ægyptians and the SemitidÆ. As to the Hottentots—they, perhaps, are more widely separated from their next of kin than any Americans, the Eskimo not being excepted; so much so, that if the phÆnomena of their language be either denied Now if the reader have attended to the differences between the Ethnological and the Anthropological principles of classification, he must have inferred the necessity of certain differences of nomenclature, since it is hardly likely that the terms which suit the one study will exactly fit the other. And such is really the case. If the word Negro mean the combination of woolly hair, with a jetty skin, depressed nose, thick lips, narrow forehead, acute facial angle, and prominent jaw, it applies to Africans as widely different from each other as the Laplander is from the Samoeid and Eskimo, or the Englishman from the Finlander. It applies to the inhabitants of certain portions of different river-systems, independent of relationship—and vice versÂ. The Negros of Kordofan are nearer in descent to the Copts and Arabs than are the lighter-coloured and more civilized Fulahs. They are also nearer to the same than they are to the Blacks of the Senegambia. If this be the case, the term has no place in Ethnology, except so far as its extensive use makes it hard to abandon. Its real application is to Anthropology, wherein it means the effect of certain influences upon certain intertropical Africans, irrespective of descent, but not irrespective of physical condition. Of the African populations most immediately in contact with the typical Negro of the western coast, the fairest are the Nufi (conterminous with the Ibos of the Lower Niger) and the Fulahs who are spread over the highlands of Senegambia, as far in the interior as SakatÚ, and as far south as the Nufi frontier. On the other hand, the darkest of the fairer families are the Tuaricks of Wadreag, who belong to the Berber family, and the Sheyga Arabs of Nubia. The Nubians themselves, or the natives of the Middle Nile between Ægypt and Sennaar, are truly transitional in features between the Ægyptians and the Blacks of Kordofan. So they are The best measure of capacity, in this respect, on the part of those Africans who have been less favoured by external circumstances and geographical position than the ancient Ægyptians, is to be found amongst the Mandingos and Fulahs, each of which nations has adopted the Mahometan religion and some portion of the Arabic literature along with it. Of large towns there are more in Negro Africa than there has ever been in Mongolia and Tartary. Yet the Tartars are neither more nor less than Turks like those of Constantinople, and the Mongolians are closely connected with the industrial Chinese. That the uniformity of languages throughout Africa is greater than it is either in Asia or Europe, is a statement to which I have not the least hesitation in committing myself. And now, having brought the African migration—to which I allot the Semitic populations of Arabia, Syria, and Babylonia—from its extremity at the Cape to a point so near the hypothetical centre as the frontiers of Persia and Armenia, I leave it for the present. The English of England are not the earliest But Britain is an island. Everything relating to the natural history of the useful arts is so wholly uninvestigated, that no one has proposed even to approximate the date of the first launch of the first boat; in other words, of the first occupancy of a piece of land surrounded by water. The whole of that particular continent in which the first protoplasts saw light, may have remained full to overflowing before a single frail raft had effected the first human migration. Britain may have remained a solitude for centuries and milleniums after Gaul had been full. I do not suppose this to have been the case; but, unless we imagine the first canoe to have been built On continents, we must assume the extension from one point to another to have been continuous—and not only this, but we may assume something like an equable rate of diffusion also. I have heard that the American population moves bodily from east to west at the rate of about eleven miles a year. As I use the statement solely for the sake of illustrating my subject, its accuracy is not very important. To simplify the calculation, let us say ten. At this rate a circle of migration of which the centre was (say) in the Altai range, would enlarge its diameter at the rate of twenty miles a year—i.e. ten miles at one end of the radius and ten at the other. Hence a point a thousand miles from the birth-place of the patriarchs of our species would receive its first occupants exactly one hundred years after the original locality had been found too limited. At this rate a very few centuries would people the Cape of Good Hope, and fewer still Now as long as any continental extremities of the earth’s surface remain unoccupied—the stream (or rather the enlarging circle of migration) not having yet reached them—the primary migration is going on; and when all have got their complement, the primary migration is over. During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in movement, and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high function of subduing the earth, are in conflict with physical obstacles, and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless—like Lot’s wife—he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men—at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words—during the primary migration—the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate. But before many generations have passed away, all becomes full to overflowing; so that men must enlarge their boundaries at the expense of their fellows. The migrations that now take place are secondary. They differ from the primary in many respects. They are slower, because the resistance is that of Humanity to Humanity; and they are violent, because dispossession is the object. They are partial, abortive, followed by the fusion of different populations; or followed by their extermination—as the case may be. All, however, that we have now to say about them is the fact of their difference from the primary one. Concerning the secondary migrations we have a considerable amount of knowledge. History tells us of some; ethnological induction suggests others. The primary one, however, is a great mystery. Yet it is one which is continually talked about. I mention it now, (having previously enlarged upon it,) for the sake of suggesting a question of some importance in practical Ethnology. It is the one suggested by the remarks upon the aborigines of Britain. When are we sure that the population of any part of a continent is primary—i.e. descended However, where we have, in addition to the absence of the signs of previous occupancy, an extreme locality, (i.e. a locality at the farthest distance, in a given direction, from the hypothetical centre,) we have prim facie evidence in favour of the population representing a primary migration. Thus:—
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