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--Papuás--Polynesians--Micronesians--Malagasi--
Hottentots--Kaffres--Negroes--Berbers--Abyssinians--Copts--the
Semitic family--Primary and secondary migrations.
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
principle of not multiplying causes unnecessarily. The answer would
be--_the centre_. From the centre we can people the parts about the
circumference without making any line of migration longer than half a
diameter; and without supposing any one out of such numerous lines to
be longer than the other. This last is the chief point--the point which
more especially fixes us to the centre as a hypothetical birth-place;
since, the moment we say that any part of the circumference was
reached by a shorter or longer line than any other, we make a specific
assertion, requiring specific arguments to support it. These may or may
not exist. Until, however, they have been brought forward, we apply
the rule _de non apparentibus_, &c., and keep to our conventional
and provisional point in the centre--remembering, of course, its
provisional and conventional character, and recognising its existence
only as long as the search for something more real and definite
continues.
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:--
1. Tierra del Fuego.
2. Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land).
3. Easter Island--the furthest extremity of Polynesia.
4. The Cape of Good Hope, or the country of the Saabs (Hottentots).
5. Lapland.
6. Ireland.
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 his
canoe, his paddles, his spears, his bow, his slings, and his domestic
architecture. All are rude--the bow-strings are made exclusively of
the sinews of animals, his arrows headed with stone. Of wood there is
little, and of metal less; and, low as is the latitude, the dress, or
undress, is said to make a nearer approach to absolute nakedness than
is to be found in many of the inter-tropical countries.
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[11] the population wore the skins of land-animals, and looked
like hunters rather than fishers and sealers. Otherwise, as a general
rule, the Fuegians are _boatmen_.
Not so their nearest kinsmen. They are all horsemen; and in their more
northern localities the most formidable ones in the world--Patagonians
of considerable but exaggerated stature, Pampa Indians between Buenos
Ayres and the southern Andes, and, higher up, the Chaco Indians of
the water-system of the river Plata. To these must be added two other
families--one on the Pacific and one on the Atlantic--the Araucanians
of Chili, and the Charruas of the lower La Plata.
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[12] to the country of their conquerors.
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 were
cut down, root and branch; a few survivors only remaining.
_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.
_a._ _Araucanian branch of the Ando-Peruvians._--Colour light olive;
form massive; trunk somewhat disproportionately long; face nearly
circular; nose short and flat; lips thin; physiognomy sombre, cold.
_b._ _Pampa branch of the Pampa Indians._--Colour deep olive-brown, or
_maroon_; form Herculean; forehead vaulted; face large, flat, oblong;
nose short; nostrils large; mouth wide; lips large; eyes horizontal;
physiognomy cold, often savage.
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. The civilization of Peru has no analogue beyond
the Tropics; and if we are to consider this as a phænomenon _per se_,
as the result of an instinct as different from those of the Charrua
as the architectural impulses of the bee and the hornet, broad and
trenchant must be our lines of demarcation. Yet no such lines can be
drawn. Undoubted members of the Quichua stock of the Inca Peruvians
(architects and conquerors, as that particular branch was) are but
ordinary Indians--like the Aymaras. Nay, the modern Peruvians when
contrasted with their ancestors are in the same category. The present
occupants of the parts about Titicaca and Tiaguanaco wonder at the
ruins around them, and confess their inability to rival them just as a
modern Greek thinks of the Phidian Jupiter and despairs. Again, the gap
is accounted for--since most of those intervening populations which may
have exhibited transitional characters have become either extinct, or
denationalized. Between the Peruvians and Araucanians, the Atacamas and
Changos are the only remaining populations--under 10,000 in number, and
but little known.
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 families is no
greater than the displacements which have taken place around, and our
own ignorance in respect to parts in contact with it.
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 inter-tropical as themselves, and the influences
of climate would coincide with the influences of descent; whereas if
it were North America from which they originated, their ancestors of
a corresponding generation would represent the effect of a climate
twenty-five degrees further north--these, in their turn, being
descended from the occupants of the temperate, and they from those
of the frigid zone. The full import of the relation of the lines of
migration--real or hypothetical--to the degrees of latitude has yet to
be duly appreciated. To say that the latter go for nothing because the
inter-tropical Indian of South America is not as black as the negro, is
to compare things that resemble each other in one particular only.
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 hesitate to do this should undertake the
difficult task of proving a negative: otherwise they multiply causes
unnecessarily.
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--
_a._ _Peruvian branch._--Colour deep olive-brown; form massive; trunk
long in proportion to the limbs; forehead retreating; nose aquiline;
mouth large; physiognomy sombre:--Aymara and Quichua Peruvians.
_b._ _Antisian branch._--Colour varying from a deep olive to nearly
white; form not massive; forehead not retreating; physiognomy lively,
mild:--Yuracarés, Mocéténès, Tacanas, Maropas, and Apolistas.
The Yuracarés, Mocéténès, Tacanas, Maropas, and Apolistas, are
_Antisien_; and their locality is the eastern slopes of the Andes[13],
between 15° and 18° S. lat. Here they dwell in a thickly wooded
country, full of mountain streams, and their corresponding valleys. One
portion of them at least is so much lighter-skinned than the Peruvians,
as to have taken its name from its colour--_Yurak-kare_ = _white man_.
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.
_a._ _Chiquito branch._--Colour light olive; form moderately
robust; mouth moderate; lips thin; features delicate; physiognomy
lively:--Indians of the Mission of Chiquitos.
_b._ _Moxos branch._--Form robust; lips thickish; eyes not _bridés_;
physiognomy mild:--Indians of the Mission of Moxos.
And now we are on the great water-system of the Amazons; with the
united effects of heat and moisture. They are not the same as in
Africa. There are no negroes here. The skin is in some cases yellow
rather than brown; in some it has a red tinge. The stature, too, is
low; not like that of the negro, tall and bulky. It is evident that
heat is not everything; and that it may have an inter-tropical amount
of intensity without necessarily affecting the colour beyond a certain
degree. As to differences between the physical conditions of Brazil and
Guiana on one side, and those of the countries we have been considering
on the other, they are important. The condition of both the soil and
climate determines to agriculture. This gives us a contrast to the
Pampa Indians; whilst, in respect to the Peruvians, there is no longer
the Andes with its concomitants; no longer the variety of climate
within the same latitude, the abundance of building materials, and the
absence of rivers. Boatmen, cultivators, and foresters--_i. e._ hunters
of the wood rather than of the open prairie--such are the families in
question. Into groups of _small_ classificational value they divide and
subdivide indefinitely more than the few investigators have suggested;
indeed, D’Orbigny throws them all into one class.
The tribes of the Orinoco form the last section of Indians, which are
neither Guarani nor Caribs; and this brief notice of their existence
clears the ground for the somewhat fuller account of the next two
families.
_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 lies mostly in Guiana and Venezuela. The chief
population of Trinidad _is_, that of the Antilles _was_, Carib. The
Caribs, the Inca Peruvians, the Pampa horsemen, and the Fuegian boatmen
represent the four extremes of the South American populations.
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 Sapiboconi--these belonging to Moxos. In Chiquitos are--1. The
Covareca. 2. The Curuminaca. 3. The Curavi. 4. The Curucaneca. 5. The
Corabeca. 6. The Samucu.
C. In Brazil, the tribes, other than Guarani, of which I have seen
vocabularies representing mutually unintelligible tongues, are--
1. The Botocudo, fiercest of cannibals.
2. The Goitaca, known to the Portuguese as _Coroados_ or _Tonsured_.
3. The Camacan with several dialects.
4. The Kiriri and Sabuja.
5. The Timbira.
6. The Pareci, the predominant population of the Mata Grosso.
7. The Mundrucu, on the southern bank of the Amazons between the rivers
Mauhé and Tabajos.
8. The Muru.
9, 10, 11. The Yameo, Maina, and Chimano between the Madera and the
Ucayale.
12. The Coretu, the only one out of forty tribes known to us by a
vocabulary, for the parts between the left bank of the Amazons and the
right of the Rio Negro.
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 R. Schomburgk. Here, besides numerous well-marked divisions of the
Carib group, we have--
1. The Warows, arboreal boatmen--boatmen because they occupy the Delta
of the Orinoco, and the low coast of Northern Guiana--and arboreal
because the floods drive them up into the trees for a lodging. In
physical form the Warows are like their neighbours; but their language
has been reduced to no class, and their peculiar habits place them in
strong contrast with most other South Americans. They are the Marshmen
of a country which is at once a delta and a forest.
2. The Taruma.
3. The Wapisiana, with the Atúrai, Daúri, and Amaripas as extinct, or
nearly extinct, sections of them--themselves only a population of four
hundred.
E. Venezuela means the water-system of Orinoco, and here we have the
mutually unintelligible tongues of--
1. _The Salivi_, of which the Aturi are a division--the Aturi known
from Humboldt’s description of their great sepulchral cavern on the
cataracts of the Orinoco; where more than six hundred bodies were
preserved in woven bags or baskets--some mummies, some skeletons, some
varnished with odoriferous resins, some painted with arnotto, some
bleached white, some naked. This custom re-appears in parts of Guiana.
The Salivi have undergone great displacement; since there is good
reason for believing that their language was once spoken in Trinidad.
2. _The Maypures._
3. _The Achagua._
4. _The Yarura_, to which the _Betoi_ is allied; and possibly--
_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 same in Mexico and Peru;
seen to the best advantage in those two countries, yet by no means
wanting in the intermediate districts; remarkable in many respects,
but not more remarkable than the existence of three climates under one
degree of latitude.
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[14]
country--the language is the Maya, and it is as unreasonable to suppose
that the Asteks built these, as to attribute the Astek ruins to Mayas.
It is an illegitimate assumption to argue that, because certain
buildings were contained within the empire of Montezuma, they were
therefore Astek in origin or design. More than twenty other nations
occupied that vast kingdom; and in most parts of it, _where stone is
abundant_, we find architectural remains.
Architecture, cities, and the consolidation of empire which they
determine, keep along the line of the Andes. They also stand in an
evident _ratio_ to the agricultural conditions of the soil and
climate. The Chaco and Pampa habits which stood so much in contrast
with the industrial civilization of Peru, and so coincided with the
open prairie character of the country, re-appear in Texas. They
increase in the great valley of the Mississippi. Nevertheless the
Indians of Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and
the old _forests_ were partially agricultural. They were also capable
of political consolidation. Powhattan, in Virginia, ruled over kings
and sub-kings even as Montezuma did. Picture-writing--so-called--of
which much has been said as a Mexican characteristic, is being found
every day to be commoner and commoner amongst the Indians of the United
States and Canada.
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[15] of the present time.
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 with
the Asteks, to assume even any extraordinary intercourse, would be
unsafe. Their traditions, indeed, suggest the idea of a migration;
but their language contradicts their traditions. They are simply what
the other natives of Florida were. I see in the accounts of the early
Appalachians little but Mexicans and Peruvians _minus_ their metals,
and gems, and mountains.
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, had
been as well known as we know Canada and New Brunswick, there would
never have been any doubts or difficulties as to the origin of the
so-called Red Indians of the New World; and no one would ever have
speculated about Africans finding their way to Brazil, or Polynesians
to California. The common-sense _primâ facie_ view would have been
admitted at once, instead of being partially refined on and partially
abandoned. North-eastern Asia would have passed for the fatherland
to North-western America, and instead of Chinese and Japanese
characteristics creating wonder when discovered in Mexico and Peru,
the only wonder would have been in the rarity of the occurrence.
But geographical discovery came from another quarter, and as it was
the Indians of the Atlantic whose history first served as food for
speculation, the most natural view of the origin of the American
population was the last to be adopted--perhaps it has still to be
recognized.
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. Size, manners, physical
conformation, and language, all help to separate the two stocks. But
this contrast extends only to the parts _east_ of the Rocky Mountains.
On the west of them there is no such abruptness, no such definitude,
no such trenchant lines of demarcation. The Athabascan dialects of New
Caledonia and Russian America are notably interspersed with Eskimo
words, and _vice versâ_. So is the Kolúch tongue of the parts about
New Archangel. As for a remarkable dialect called the Ugalents (or
Ugyalyackhmutsi) spoken by a few families about Mount St. Elias, it
is truly transitional in character. Besides this, what applies to the
languages applies to the other characteristics as well.
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 tribes of the Algonkin class have pressed upon the
Eskimo from the south; and just as the present Norwegians and Swedes
now occupy the country of a family which was originally akin to the
Laps of Lapland (but with more southern characters), the Micmacs and
other Red Men have superseded the southerly and transitional Eskimo.
Meanwhile, in North-_western_ America no such displacement has taken
place. The families still stand _in situ_; and the phænomena of
transition have escaped obliteration.
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. The Japanese and Corean populations are so truly
of the same class with the Curile islanders, and the Koriaks to the
north of the sea of the Okhotsk are so truly Kamskadale, that we may
now consider ourselves as having approached our conventional centre
so closely as to be at liberty to leave the parts in question for the
consideration of another portion of the circumference--another extreme
point of divergence.
II. _From Van Diemen’s Land to the South-Eastern parts of Asia._--The
aborigines of Van Diemen’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 Van Diemen’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 between the two islands
seems to have been little or none. Short specimens of four mutually
unintelligible dialects are all that I have had the opportunity of
comparing. They belong to the same class with those of Australia, New
Guinea, and the Papua islands; and this is all that can safely be said
about them.
It is an open question whether the Tasmanians reached Van Diemen’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
_primâ 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 Floris at the present moment,
and inferred to have existed in Java and Sumatra before the development
of the peculiar and encroaching civilization of the Mahometan Malays.
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 _viâ_ New Guinea; the other is _viâ_
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. These
took their occupants from different islands of the great group to which
they belong; of which the Navigators’ Islands were, probably, the first
to be peopled. The Radack, Ralik, Caroline, and Pelew groups connect
this group with either the Philippines or the Moluccas; and when we
reach these, we arrive at the point where the Papuan and Polynesian
lines diverge. Just as the Papuan line overlapped or wound round
Australia, so do the Micronesians and Polynesians form a circuit round
the whole Papuan area.
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,
with which they came in geographical contact, was monosyllabic.
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 3000 miles of
open sea lies between them[16], and a strong trade-wind prevails in
the greater part of it. A voyage from the Indian Islands to Madagascar
is possible, even in the rude state of Malayan navigation; but return
would be wholly impossible. Commerce, conquests, or colonization, are,
consequently, utterly out of the question, as means of conveying any
portion of the Malayan language to Madagascar. There remains, then, but
one way in which this could have taken place--the fortuitous arrival
on the shores of Madagascar of tempest-driven Malayan _praus_. The
south-east monsoon, which is but a continuation of the south-east
trade-wind, prevails from the tenth degree of south latitude to the
equator, its greatest force being felt in the Java Sea, and its
influence embracing the western half of the island of Sumatra. This
wind blows from April to October, and an easterly gale during this
period might drive a vessel off the shores of Sumatra or Java, so as
to make it impossible to regain them. In such a situation she would
have no resource but putting before the wind, and making for the first
land that chance might direct her to; and that first land would be
Madagascar. With a fair wind and a stiff breeze, which she would be
sure of, she might reach that island, without difficulty, in a month.
* * * The occasional arrival in Madagascar of a shipwrecked _prau_
might not, indeed, be sufficient to account for even the small portion
of Malayan found in the Malagasi; but it is offering no violence to
the manners or history of the Malay people, to imagine the probability
of a piratical fleet, or a fleet carrying one of those migrations of
which there are examples on record, being tempest-driven, like a single
_prau_. Such a fleet, well equipped, well stocked, and well manned,
would not only be fitted for the long and perilous voyage, but reach
Madagascar in a better condition than a fishing or trading boat. It may
seem, then, not an improbable supposition, that it was through one or
more fortuitous adventures of this description, that the language of
Madagascar received its influx of Malayan.”
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 numbered by notches on the
side of the canoe, and twenty-one were thus marked when met with by our
vessel.”
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[17] being taken on the one side
and the other African languages[18] on the other. I leave it to the
reader to pronounce upon the import of the table; adding only the
decided expression of my own belief that the coincidences in question
are too numerous to be accidental, too little onomatopœic to be
organic, and too widely as well as too irregularly distributed to be
explained by the assumption of intercourse or intermixture.
_English_ sun.
Saab _t’koara._
Hottentot _sorre._
Corana _sorob._
Agow _quorah._
Somauli _ghurrah._
Kru _guiro._
Kanga _jiro._
Wawn _jirri._
_English_ tongue.
Corana _tamma._
Bushman _t’inn._
Fertit _timi._
_English_ neck.
Bushman _t’kau._
Darfur _kiu._
_English_ hand.
Corana _t’koam._
Shilluck _kiam._
_English_ tree.
Corana _peikoa._
Bushman _t’hauki._
Shilluck _yuke._
_English_ mountain.
Corana _teub._
Falasha _duba._
_English_ ear.
Corana _t’naum._
Bullom _naimu._
_English_ star.
Corana _kambrokoa._
Kossa _rumbereki._
_English_ bird.
Bushman _t’kanni._
Mandingo _kuno._
_English_ sleep.
Corana _t’kchom._
Bushman _t’koing._
Susu _kima._
Howssa _kuana._
_English_ fire.
Corana _taib._
Congo _tubia._
Somauli _dub._
Bushman _t’jih._
Fot _diu._
Ashantee _ojia._
_English_ neck.
Bushman _t’kau._
Makua _tchico._
_English_ die.
Corana _t’koo._
Bushman _tkuki._
Makua _ocoa = dead._
_English_ good.
Corana _t’kain._
Bushman _teteini._
Makua _oni-touny._
_English_ foot.
Corana _t’nah._
Hottentot _t’noah._
Makua _nyahai._
_English_ drink.
Corana _t’kchaa._
Howssa _sha._
_English_ star.
Bushman _tkoaati._
Bagnon _hoquooud._
Fulah _kode._
_English_ child.
Corana _t’kob._
Bushman _t’katkoang._
Bagnon _colden._
Timmani _kalent._
Bullom _tshant._
_English_ tree.
Bushman _t’huh._
Seracolé, &c. _ite._
_English_ foot.
Corana _t’keib._
Bushman _t’koah._
Sereres _akiaf._
Waag Agau _tsab._
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 of these latter had been very
different from that of the Kaffres and the Hottentots. It was narrow
in extent, and lay in fertile islands, cooled by the breezes and
evaporation of the ocean, rather than across the arid table-land of
Central Africa--the parts between the Gulf of Guinea and the mouth of
the river Juba.
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 attribute all points of similarity to intercourse only--none to
original affinity. Yet this is done largely. The Hottentot language
contains a sound which I believe to be an _in_-aspirated _h_, _i. e._
a sound of _h_ formed by _drawing in_ the breath, rather than by
_forcing it out_--as is done by the rest of the world. This is called
the _click_. It is a truly inarticulate sound; and as the common _h_
is found in the language as well, the Hottentot speech presents the
remarkable phenomenon of _two_ inarticulate sounds, or two sounds
common to man and the lower animals. As a point of anthropology this
may be of value: in ethnology it has probably been misinterpreted.
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 at once
Hottentot and Kaffre. It means either a Deity or an epithet appropriate
to a Deity. Surely the doctrine that the Kaffres have simply borrowed
part of their theological vocabulary from the Hottentots is neither the
only nor the most logical inference here.
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 then? Until the
philological evidence in favour of the community of origin of the
intertropical Africans of Congo on the west, and of Inhambame, Sofala,
the Mozambique, &c. on the east, was known, no one spoke of the natives
in any of those countries as being anything else but Negro, or thought
of enlarging upon such differences as are now found between them and
the typical Black.
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[19].
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 valleys of rivers
that they are to be found. There are none in the extra-tropical parts
of Northern, none in the corresponding parts of Southern Africa; and
but few on the table-lands of even the two sides of the equator. Their
areas, indeed, are scanty and small; one lies on the Upper Nile, one
on the Lower Gambia and Senegal, one on the Lower Niger, and the last
along the western coast, where the smaller rivers that originate in the
Kong Mountains form hot and moist alluvial tracts.
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 they were the
occupants as long as a native population occupied them at all. Members
of the same stock were the ancient subjects of Jugurtha, Syphax, and
Masinissa. Mr. Francis Newman, who has paid more attention to the
speech of the Berber tribes than any Englishman (perhaps than any
European), has shown that it deserves the new and convenient name of
_Sub_-Semitic--a term to be enlarged on.
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 occur when we form
an adjective like _tyránnical_, from a substantive like _týrant_, be
superadded.
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 as the vowels themselves are subject to
change, (these changes acting upon the accentuation,) the triliteralism
becomes more important still. The consonants look like the framework
or skeleton of the words, the vowels being the modifying influences.
The one are the _constants_, the other the _variants_; and _triliteral
roots with internal modifications_ becomes a philological byword which
is supposed to represent a unique phenomenon in the way of speech,
rather than the simple result of two or three common processes united
in one and the same language.
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 _Henĕry_,
_bĕred_, _curŭb_, were the true sounds; or that, if they were not so in
the nineteenth century, they were two thousand years ago.
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 of ancient, and, partially, of
modern Syria, the Mesopotamians, the Phœnicians, the Assyrians,
the Babylonians, the Arabs, and certain populations of Æthiopia or
Abyssinia.
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 course there was a certain amount of relationship
of some kind; but it by no means followed that this established the
real affiliations. There was _a_ connexion; but not _the_ connexion.
The reasons for this view lay partly in certain undoubted affinities
with the Persians, and partly in the fact of the Jew, Syrian and Arab
skulls, and the Jew, Syrian and Arab civilizations coming under the
category of _Caucasian_.
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, the Coptic and the
Galla are clear and unequivocal; in other words, that these languages
are truly Sub-Semitic.
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[20], into
the Agow tongue, unequivocally indigenous to Abyssinia; and through
this into the true Negro classes.
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[21].
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 or explained away, they may pass for a new species.
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. As truly as a
short stature and light skin coincide with the occupancy of mountain
ranges, the Negro physiognomy coincides with that of the alluvia of
rivers. Few writers are less disposed to account for ethnological
differences by reference to a change of physical conditions rather
than original distinction of species than Dr. Daniell; nevertheless,
he expressly states that when you leave the low swamps of the Delta of
the Niger for the sandstone country of the interior, the skin becomes
fairer, and black becomes brown, and brown yellow.
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 in language and apparently in
civilizational development.
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 occupants of the island.
Before them were the ancient Britons. Were these the earliest
occupants? Who were the men by whose foot Britain, till then the home
of the lower animals alone, was first trodden? This is uncertain. Why
may not the Kelts have stood in the same relation to some rude Britons
still more primitive, that the Anglo-Saxons did to the Kelts? Perhaps
they really did so. Perhaps, even the rude and primitive tribes thus
assumed had aborigines who looked upon them as intruders, themselves
having in their turn been interlopers. The chief objection against thus
multiplying aboriginal aborigines is the rule _de non apparentibus_, &c.
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 simultaneously
with the demand for water-transport, it is as easy to allow that a
long period intervened between that time and the first effort of
seamanship as a short one. Hence, the date of the original populations
of _islands_ is not in the same category with that of the dispersion of
men and women over _continents_.
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 Lapland, the parts about Cape Comorin, the Malayan Peninsula,
and Kamskatka--all parts more or less in the condition of extreme
points[22].
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 from, or representative of, the first
occupants? Never. There are plenty of cases where, from history, from
the phænomena of contrast, and from other ethnological arguments, we
are quite satisfied that it is _not_ so; but none where the evidence
is conclusive the other way. At the same time, the doctrine _de non
apparentibus_ cautions us against assuming displacements unnecessarily.
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 _primâ facie_ evidence in favour of the population representing
a _primary_ migration. Thus:--
1, 2. The Hottentots and Laplanders amongst the families of the
Continent are probably primary.
3. The Irish Gaels are the same amongst islanders.
4, 5. America and the Oceanic area appear to be _primary_ in respect to
the populations of the Continent of Asia; though within their own areas
the displacements have been considerable.
FOOTNOTES
[11] Pickering, Races of Men, p. 19.
[12] The Araucana of Ercilla.
[13] D’Orbigny, Homme Américain.
[14] Astek means the Mexicans of the valley of Mexico who spoke the
Astek language. _Mexican_, as applied to the kingdom conquered by
Cortez, is a political rather than an ethnological term.
[15] Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. i.
[16] The Indian Islands and Madagascar.
[17] Viz. the Korana, Saab, Hottentot, and Bushman.
[18] The Agow, Somauli, and the rest; some being spoken very far north,
as the Agow and Seracolé. This list has already been published by the
author in his Report on Ethnological Philology (Transactions of the
Association for the Advancement of Science, 1847).
[19] A table showing this is to be found in the Transactions of the
British Association for 1847, &c., pp. 224–228.
[20] Transactions of the Philological Society, No. 33.
[21] A short table of the Berber and Coptic, as compared with the
other African tongues, may be seen in the Classical Museum, and in
the Transactions of the British Association, &c. for 1846. In the
Transactions of the Philological Society is a grammatical sketch of the
Tumali language, by Dr. L. Tutshek of Munich. Now the Tumali is a truly
Negro language of Kordofan; whilst in respect to the extent to which
its inflections are formed by internal changes of vowels and accents,
it is fully equal to the Semitic tongues of Palestine and Arabia.
[22] Nothing is said about Cape Horn; as America in relation to Asia
is an island. It is also, perhaps, unnecessary to repeat that both the
rate and the centre are hypothetical--either or both may or may not
be correct. That which is _not_ hypothetical is the approximation to
an _equability of rate in the case of continents_. It is difficult to
conceive any such conditions, as those which deferred the occupancy
of islands like Madagascar and Iceland, by emigrants from Africa or
Greenland, for an indefinite period, keeping one part of Africa or
Greenland empty whilst another was full. Hence, the equability in
question is a mere result of the absence, _on continents_, of any
conditions capable of arresting it for an indefinite period. The extent
to which it may be interfered with by other causes is no part of the
present question.