comes in to shed light upon the very cradle of humanity, and to
consecrate the memory of generations long since engulphed in the
quicksands of time.” Thus much is certainly within the competency
of “ philology and we may concède to it also the faculty, where the
historic elements for comparison exist—as in the range of Indo-ger-
manic, Semitic, and some few other well-studied groups of tongues—
of ascertaining relationships of intercourse between widely-separate
families of man ; hut not always, as it is fashionable now to claim,
and which I will presently show to he absurd, of a community of
origin between two given races physiologically and geographically
distinct. Again, no tongue is permanent. More than 150 years ago,
Richard Bentley, perhaps the greatest critic of his age,486 exemplified
this axiom while unmasking: the G-reek O forOgeries of Alexandrian
sophists. “ Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of liying
creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration ; some words go off,
and become obsolete ; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into
common use; or the same word is inverted in a new sense and notion,
which in tract of time makes as observable a change in the air and
features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.
All are sensible of this in their own native tongues, where continual
use makes a man a critic.” But, at the same time that this is the
law deduced from the historical evidences of written languages, its
action is enormously accelerated among petty barbarous tribes, such
as a few Asiatic, many African, several American, and still more
frequently among the Malayan, and Oeeanico-Australian races.
Here, mere linguistic land-marks are as often completely effaced as
re-established ; while the typical characteristics of the race endure,
and therefore can alone serve as bases for ethnic classification. Yet
we read every day in some shape or other:
“ The decision of the Academy (of St. Petersburg, 40 years ago)
was, however, quite unreserved upon this point; for it maintains its
conviction, after a long research, that all languages are to be considered
as dialects (of one) now lost."itn This enunciation of an. eminent
Cardinal, although dating some 20 years back, is still quoted and
re-quoted by thankful imbecility which, on any other point of doctrine,
would shudder at Romanist authority. And it excites Homeric
smiles among those who happen to know the estimation in which
Egyptologists now hold M. de Goulianoff’s Archeologie égyptienne and
Aerologie, to see his report to the Russian Academy used as a dogmatical
finality to further linguistic advancement! In England he
486 Dissertations upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and upon the
Fables of Æsop (1699); Dyce’s ed., London, 8vo, 1836; II, p. 1.
487 Wiseman, Connection^c., 2d ed., 8vo, London, 1842 ; pp. 68-9. 4
nas been succeeded by a school which discards the term “ race” altogether
; because its Oracle, after an amazing number of contradictory
propositions, has latterly stated488 how “ he believes that all the
varieties of man are referable to a single species,” as per catalogue,
Luke Burke judiciously comments, of barbarian vocabularies.
One recipe, for attaining expeditiously a conclusion so devoutly
wished, is simple enough. It is the following:—1st, to start with
king James’s version of Genesis, Chapter IV, verse 25:—2d, to jump
over 4730 years that an Archbishop says have elapsed from that day
to this, and take the population descended from “Adam and Eve” to
he now exactly 1,216,670,000 :i89—3d, to invent a sort of frame-work
(say “ escritoire”) containing precisely 9 pigeon-holes:—4th, to label
them Monosyllabic, Turanian, Caucasian (alias Dioscurian, said to be
the same tiling), Persian, Indian, Oceanic, American, African, and
European:— 5th, disregarding such trifles as history, anatomy, or
physiological distinctions, to squeeze all humanity, “ as per vocabulary,”
into these 9 compartments:—6th, to chant “ teDeum” over the
whole performance;—and lastly, 7th, to baptize as infidels those who
disbelieve the “ unity of the human species” to be proved by any
such hocus-pocus, or arbitrary methods of establishing that of which
Science, at the present day, owing to insufficiency of materials,
humbly confesses herself to be ignorant; whilst she indignantly repudiates,
as impertinent and mendacious, the suppression of all facts
that are too three-cornered to be jammed into the 9 pigeon-holes aforesaid.
Such, in sober sadness, is the effect produced upon the minds
of unbiassed anthropologists, by this unscientific system. They cannot,
for the life of them, as concerns real ethnology, where the theo-
loger sees in each of these 9 pigeon-holes a wondrous “confirmation,”
perceive in the whole arrangement anything more than a reflex of
the mind of their ingenious inventor. What true philological science
has achieved, in the 6th year after the middle of our XlXth century,
may be studied in M. Alfred Maury’s Chapter I of this volume. Its
results do not appear to favor monogenistic theories of human language.
It is with the express object of avoiding this, or any other unnatural
system, that my “ Ethnographic Tableau ” has been prepared. Typographical
exigencies compel an appearance, I must allow, of arbitrary
classification: but no definitive bar to progress is intended by its
arrangement; and I shall be proud to follow any better that impartial
inquiries into Nature’s laws may in the future elicit. Such as this
488 London Athenoeum, June 17, 1854.
m E a t e n s x e m , Descriptive Notes, and Ethnographical Map of the World, London, 1854;
pp. 2P-4.