That we spoke at all might rightly be called a work of nature, _opera
naturale_, as Dante said long ago; but that we spoke thus or thus,
_cosi o cosi_, that, as the same Dante said, depended on our
pleasure--that was our work. To imagine, therefore, that as a matter
of necessity, or as a matter of fact, dolichocephalic skulls had
anything to do with Aryan, mesophalic with Semitic, or brachycephalic
with Turanian speech, was nothing but the wildest random thought. It
could convey no rational meaning whatever; we might as well say that
all painters were dolichocephalic, and all musicians brachycephalic,
or that all lophocomic tribes worked in gold, and all lisocomic tribes
in silver. If anything must be ascribed to prehistoric times, surely
the differentiation of the human skull, the human hair and the human
skin would have to be ascribed to that distant period. No one, he
believed, had ever maintained that a mesocephalic skull was split or
differentiated into a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic variety in
the bright sunshine of history. Nevertheless, he had felt for years
that knowledge of languages must be considered in future as a _sine
qua non_ for every anthropologist. How few of the books in which we
trusted with regard to the characteristic peculiarities of savage
races had been written by men who had lived among them for ten or
twenty years, and who had learned their languages till they could
speak them as well as the natives themselves. It was no excuse to say
that any traveler who had eyes to see and ears to hear could form a
correct estimate of the doings and sayings of savage tribes.