die Naturgeschichte des Menschen, pp. 16-18. Weimar, 1858.]
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 title 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 identity of Haytian French with that spoken on
the shores 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 Provençal,
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. HOMO. Nosce te ipsum.
Sapiens. 1. H. diurnus: _varians cultura, loco._
_Ferus_. Tetrapus, mutus, hirsutus.
* * * * *
_Americanus_ [Greek: a]. Rufus, cholericus, rectus--_Pilis_
nigris, rectis, crassis--_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 sex, 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; coarse, projecting jaws; broad and
dilated, but not especially flattened, noses; and lips which, though
prominent, are eminently flexible.
The skulls of these people are always long and narrow, with a smaller
development of the frontal sinuses than usually corresponds with such
largely developed brow ridges. An Australian skull of a round form,
or one the transverse diameter of which exceeds eight-tenths of its
length, has never been seen. These people, in a word, are eminently
"dolichocephalic," or long-headed; but, with this one limitation,
their crania present considerable variations, some being comparatively
high and arched, while others are more remarkably depressed than
almost any other human skulls.
The female pelvis differs comparatively little from the European;
but in the pelves of male Australians which I have examined, the
antero-posterior and transverse diameters approach equality more
nearly than is the case in Europeans.
No Australian tribe has ever been known to cultivate the ground,
to use metals, pottery, or any kind of textile fabric. They rarely
construct huts. Their means of navigation are limited to rafts or
canoes, made of sheets of bark. Clothing, except skin cloaks for
protection from cold, is a superfluity with which they dispense; and
though they have some singular weapons, almost peculiar to themselves,
they are wholly unacquainted with bows and arrows.
It is but a step, as it were, across Bass's Straits to Tasmania.
Neither climate nor the characteristic forms of vegetable or animal
life change largely on the south side of the Straits, but the early
voyagers found Man singularly different from him on the north side.
The skin of the Tasmanian was dark, though he lived between parallels
of latitude corresponding with those of middle Europe in our own
hemisphere; his jaws projected, his head was long and narrow; his
civilization was about on a footing with that of the Australian, if
not lower, for I cannot discover that the Tasmanian understood the
use of the throwing-stick. But he differed from the Australian in his
woolly, negro-like hair, whence the name of NEGRITO, which has been
applied to him and his congeners.
Such Negritos--differing more or less from the Tasmanian, but agreeing
with him in dark skin and woolly hair--occupy New Caledonia, the New
Hebrides, the Louisiade Archipelago; and stretching to the Papuan
Islands, and for a doubtful extent beyond them to the north and
west, form a sort of belt, or zone, of Negrito population, interposed
between the Australians on the west and the inhabitants of the great
majority of the Pacific islands on the east.
The cranial characters of the Negritos vary considerably more than
those of their skin and hair, the most notable circumstance being
the strong Australian aspect which distinguishes many Negrito skulls,
while others tend rather towards forms common in the Polynesian
islands.
In civilization, New Caledonia exhibits an advance upon Tasmania, and,
farther north, there is a still greater improvement. But the bows
and arrows, the perched houses, the outrigger canoes, the habits of
betel-chewing and of kawa-drinking, which abound more or less among
the northern Negritos, are probably to be regarded not as the products
of an indigenous civilization, but merely as indications of the extent
to which foreign influences have modified the primitive social state
of these people.
From Tasmania or New Caledonia, to New Zealand or Tongataboo, is again
but a brief voyage; but it brings about a still more notable change
in the aspect of the indigenous population than that effected by the
passage of Bass's Straits. Instead of being chocolate-coloured people,
the Maories and Tongans are light brown; instead of woolly, they have
straight, or wavy, black hair. And if from New Zealand, we travel
some 5,000 miles east to Easter Island; and from Easter Island, for as
great a distance north-west, to the Sandwich Islands; and thence 7,000
miles, westward and southward, to Sumatra; and even across the Indian
Ocean, into the interior of Madagascar, we shall everywhere meet with
people whose hair is straight or wavy, and whose skins exhibit various
shades of brown. These are the Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians,
whom Latham has grouped together under the common title of
AMPHINESIANS.
The cranial characters of these people, as of the Negritos, are less
constant than those of their skin and hair. The Maori has a long
skull; the Sandwich Islander a broad skull. Some, like these, have
strong brow ridges; others, like the Dayaks and many Polynesians, have
hardly any nasal indentation.
It is only in the westernmost parts of their area that the Amphinesian
nations know anything about bows and arrows as weapons, or are
acquainted with the use of metals or with pottery. Everywhere they
cultivate the ground, construct houses, and skilfully build and manage
outrigger, or double, canoes; while, almost everywhere, they use some
kind of fabric for clothing.
Between Easter Island, or the Sandwich Islands, and any part of the
American coast is a much wider interval than that between Tasmania and
New Zealand, but the ethnological interval between the American and
the Polynesian is less than that between either of the previously
named stocks.
The typical AMERICAN has straight black hair and dark eyes, his skin
exhibiting various shades of reddish or yellowish brown, sometimes
inclining to olive. The face is broad and scantily bearded; the skull
wide and high. Such people extend from Patagonia to Mexico, and much
farther north along the west coast. In the main a race of hunters,
they had nevertheless, at the time of the discovery of the Americas,
attained a remarkable degree of civilization in some localities. They
had domesticated ruminants, and not only practised agriculture,
but had learned the value of irrigation. They manufactured textile
fabrics, were masters of the potter's art, and knew how to erect
massive buildings of stone. They understood the working of the
precious, though not of the useful, metals; and had even attained to a
rude kind of hieroglyphic, or picture, writing.
The Americans not only employ the bow and arrow, but, like some
Amphinesians, the blow-pipe, as offensive weapons: but I am not aware
that the outrigger canoe has ever been observed among them.
I have reason to suspect that some of the Fuegian tribes differ
cranially from the typical Americans; and the Northern and Eastern
American tribes have longer skulls than their Southern compatriots.
But the ESQUIMAUX, who roam on the desolate and ice-bound coasts of
Arctic America, certainly present us with a new stock. The Esquimaux
(among whom the Greenlanders are included), in fact, though they
share the straight black hair of the proper Americans, are a duller
complexioned, shorter, and more squat people, and they have still
more prominent cheek-bones. But the circumstance which most completely
separates them from the typical Americans, is the form of their
skulls, which instead of being broad, high, and truncated behind, are
eminently long, usually low, and prolonged backwards.
These Hyperborean people clothe themselves in skins, know nothing of
pottery, and hardly anything of metals. Dependent for existence upon
the produce of the chase, the seal and the whale are to them what
the cocoa-nut tree and the plantain are to the savages of more genial
climates. Not only are those animals meat and raiment, but they are
canoes, sledges, weapons, tools, windows, and fire; while they support
the dog, who is the indispensable ally and beast of burden of the
Esquimaux.
It is admitted that the Tchuktchi, on the eastern side of Behring's
Straits, are, in all essential respects, Esquimaux; and I do not know
that there is any satisfactory evidence to show that the Tunguses and
Samoiedes do not essentially share the physical characters of the same
people. Southward, there are indications of Esquimaux characters among
the Japanese, and it is possible that their influence may be traced
yet further.
However this may be, Eastern Asia, from Mantchouria to Siam, Thibet,
and Northern Hindostan, is continuously inhabited by men, usually of
short stature, with skins varying in colour from yellow to olive; with
broad cheek-bones and faces that, owing to the insignificance of the
nose, are exceedingly flat; and with small, obliquely-set, black eyes
and straight black hair, which sometimes attains a very great length
upon the scalp, but is always scanty upon the face and body. The
skull is never much elongated, and is, generally, remarkably broad
and rounded, with hardly any nasal depression, and but slight, if any,
projection of the jaws.
Many of these people, for whom the old name of MONGOLIANS may be
retained, are nomades; others, as the Chinese, have attained a
remarkable and apparently indigenous civilization, only surpassed by
that of Europe.
At the north-western extremity of Europe the Lapps repeat the
characters of the Eastern Asiatics. Between these extreme points, the
Mongolian stock is not continuous, but is represented by a chain of
more or less isolated tribes, who pass under the name of Calmucks and
Tartars, and form Mongolian islands, as it were, in the midst of an
ocean of other people.
The waves of this ocean are the nations for whom, in order
to avoid the endless confusion produced by our present
half-physical, half-philological classification, I shall use a new
name--XANTHOCHROI--indicating that they are "yellow" haired and "pale"
in complexion. The Chinese historians of the Han dynasty, writing
in the third century before our era, describe, with much minuteness,
certain numerous and powerful barbarians with "yellow hair, green
eyes, and prominent noses," who, the black-haired, skew-eyed, and
flat-nosed annalists remark in passing, are "just like the apes from
whom they are descended." These people held, in force, the upper
waters of the Yenisei, and thence under various names stretched
southward to Thibet and Kashgar. Fair-haired and blue-eyed northern
enemies were no less known to the ancient Hindoos, to the Persians,
and to the Egyptians, on the south of the great central Asiatic area;
while the testimony of all European antiquity is to the effect that,
before and since the period in question, there lay beyond the Danube,
the Rhine, and the Seine, a vast and dangerous yellow or red haired,
fair-skinned, blue-eyed population. Whether the disturbers of the
marches of the Roman Empire were called Gauls or Germans, Goths,
Alans, or Scythians, one thing seems certain, that until the invasion
of the Huns, they were tall, fair, blue-eyed men.
If any one should think fit to assume that in the year 100 B.C.,
there was one continuous Xanthochroic population from the Rhine to the
Yenisei, and from the Ural mountains to the Hindoo Koosh, I know not
that any evidence exists by which that position could be upset, while
the existing state of things is rather in its favour than otherwise.
For the Scandinavians, wholly, the Germans to a great extent, the
Slavonian and the Finnish tribes, some of the inhabitants of Greece,
many Turks, some Kirghis, and some Mantchous, the Ossetes in the
Caucasus, the Siahposh, the Rohillas, are at the present day fair,
yellow or red haired, and blue-eyed; and the interpolation of tribes
of Mongolian hair and complexion, as far west as the Caspian Steppes
and the Crimea, might justly be accounted for by those subsequent
westward irruptions of the Mongolian stock, of which history furnishes
abundant testimony.
The furthermost limit of the Xanthochroi north-westward is Iceland
and the British Isles; south-westward, they are traceable at intervals
through the Berber country, and end in the Canary Islands.
The cranial characters of the Xanthochroi are not, at present,
strictly definable. The Scandinavians are certainly long-headed; but
many Germans, the Swiss so far as they are Germanized, the Slavonians,
the Fins, and the Turks, are short-headed. What were the cranial
characters of the ancient "U-suns" and "Ting-lings" of the valley of
the Yenisei is unknown.