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.
CHAPTER V.
The Ugrians of Lapland, Finland, Permia, the Ural Mountains and the Volga—area of the light-haired families—Turanians—the Kelts of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Gaul—the Goths—the Sarmatians—the Greeks and Latins—difficulties of European ethnology—displacement—intermixture—identification of ancient families—extinction of ancient families—the Etruscans—the Pelasgi—isolation—the Basks—the Albanians—classifications and hypotheses—the term Indo-European—the Finnic hypothesis.
V. From Lapland to North-western Asia.—That the Norwegian of Norway stands in remarkable contrast to the Lap of Finmark has already been stated. There is nothing wonderful in this. The Norwegian is a German from the south, and, consequently, a member of an intrusive population.
The extent to which a similar contrast exists between the Lap and Finlander is more remarkable; since both belong to the same family. Of this family the Laps are an extreme branch both in respect to physical conformation and geographical position. The term most conveniently used to designate the stock in question is Ugrian. In Asia the Voguls, Ostiaks, Votiaks, Tsheremis, Morduins, and other tribes are Ugrian.
The Laps are generally speaking swarthy in complexion, black-haired and black-eyed; and so are the Majiars of Hungary. The other Ugrians, however, are remarkable for being, to a great extent, a blonde population. The Tshuvatsh have a light complexion with black and somewhat curly hair, and grey eyes. The Morduins fall into two divisions, the Ersad and Mokshad; of which the former are more frequently red-haired than the latter. The Tsheremiss are light-haired; the Voguls and Ostiaks often red-haired; the Votiaks the most red-haired people in the world. Of course, with this we have blue or grey eyes and fair skins.
Few writers seem ever to have considered the exceptional character of this physiognomy: indeed, it is unfortunate that no term like blanco (or branco), denoting men lighter-coloured than the Spaniards and Portuguese, in the same way that Negro denotes those who are darker, has been evolved. It is, probably, too late for it being done now. At any rate, complexions like those of the fair portion of the people of England are quite as exceptional as faces of the hue of the Gulf-of-Guinea Blacks.
Like the Negro, the White-skin is chiefly found within certain limits; and like Negro the term White is anthropological rather than ethnological, i. e. the physiognomy in question is spread over different divisions of our species, and by no means coincides with ethnological relationship.
Nine-tenths of the fair-skinned populations of the world are to be found between 30° and 65° N. lat., and west of the Oby. Nine-tenths of them also are to be found amongst the following four families:—1. The Ugrian. 2. The Sarmatian. 3. The Gothic. 4. The Keltic.
The physical conditions which most closely coincide with the geographical area of the blonde branches of the blonde families require more study than they have found. From the parts to north and south it is distinguished by the palpably intelligible differences of latitude. The parts to the east of it differ less evidently; nevertheless, they are steppes and table-lands rather than tracts of comparatively low forests. The blonde area is certainly amongst the moister parts of the world[23].
That the Ugrians graduate into the Turks of Tartary and Siberia—themselves a division of a class containing the great Mongolian and Tungusian branches—has been admitted by most writers; Schott having done the best work with the philological part of the question.
Gabelentz has, I am informed, lately shown that the Samoeid tongues come within the same class;—a statement which, without having seen his reasons, I am fully prepared to admit.
Now what applies to the Samoeids[24] applies to two other classes as well:—
This gives us one great stock, conveniently called Turanian, whereof—
- 1. The Mongolians—
- 2. The Tungusians—of which the Mantshús are the best known representatives—
- 3. The Ugrians, falling into the Lap, Finlandic, Majiar and other branches;—along with
- 4. The Hyperboreans, or Samoeids, Yeniseians, and Yukahiri—are branches.
And this stock takes us from the North Cape to the Wall of China.
VI. From Ireland to the Western parts of Asia.—The rule already referred to, viz. that an island must always be considered to have been peopled from the nearest part of the nearest land of a more continental character than itself, unless reason can be shown to the contrary, applies to the population of Ireland; subject to which view, the point of emigration from Great Britain must have been the parts about the Mull of Cantyre; and the point of immigration into Ireland must have been the province of Ulster, and the parts that are nearest to Scotland.
Upon this doctrine I see no reason whatever to refine, since the unequivocal fact of the Scotch and Irish Gaelic being the same language confirms it. Here, however, as in so many other cases, the opinions and facts by no means go together; and the notion of Scotland having been peopled from Ireland, and Ireland from some other country, is a common one. The introduction of the Scots of Scotland from the west, when examined, will be found to rest almost wholly on the following extract from Beda:—“procedente tempore, tertiam Scottorum nationem in parte Pictorum recepit, qui duce Reudâ de Hiberniâ progressi, amicitiâ vel ferro sibimet inter eos has sedes quas hactenus habent vindicârunt; à quo videlicet duce, usque hodie Dalreudini vocantur: nam eorum linguâ Daal partem significat.”
Now, as this was written about the middle of the eighth century, there are only two statements in it that can be passed for contemporary evidence, viz. the assertion that at the time of Beda a portion of Scotland was called the country of the Dalreudini; and that in their language daal meant part. The Irish origin, then, is grounded upon either an inference or a tradition; an inference or a tradition which, if true, would prove nothing as to the original population of either country; since, the reasoning which applies to the relation between the peninsula of Malacca and the island of Sumatra applies here. There, the population first passed from the peninsula to the island, and then back again—reflected so to say—from the island to the peninsula. Mutatis mutandis this was the case with Scotland and Ireland, provided that there was any migration at all.
Upon this point the evidence of Beda may or may not be sufficient for the historian. It is certainly unsatisfactory to the ethnologist.
In saying this, I by no means make the disparaging insinuation that the historian is unduly credulous, or that the ethnologist is a model of caution. Neither assertion would be true. The ethnologist, however, like a small capitalist, cannot afford so much credit as his fellow-labourer in the field of Man. He is like a traveller, who, leaving home at the twilight of the evening, must be doubly cautious when he comes to a place where two roads meet. If he take the wrong one, he has nothing but the long night before him; and his error grows from bad to worse. But the historian starts with the twilight of the dawn; so that the further he goes the clearer he finds his way, and the easier he rectifies any previous false turnings. To argue from cause to effect is to journey in the dim light of the early morn till we reach the blazing noon. To argue from effect to cause is to change the shades of evening for the gloom of night.
As Scotland is to Ireland, so is Gaul to England. From the Shannon to the Loire and Rhine, the stock is one; one, but not indivisible—the British branch (containing the Welsh) and the Gaelic (containing the Scotch) forming its two primary sections.
Next to the Kelts come the Goths; the term Gothic being a general designation taken from a particular people. Germany is the native land of these; just as Gaul was of the Kelts. Hence, they lie to the north of that family, as well as to the west of it. Intrusive above all the other populations of the earth, the branches of the Gothic tribes have brought themselves in contact and collision with half the families of the world. First, they encroached upon the Kelts, and, for a time, the tide of conquest fluctuated. It was the Rhine which was the disputed frontier—disputed as much in Cæsar’s time as our own. Next, they revenged themselves on the aggressions of Rome; so that the Ostro-goths conquered Italy, and the Visi-goths Spain. Then came the Franks of France, and the Anglo-Saxons of England. In the ninth and tenth centuries the edges of the German swords turned another way, and Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Prussia, and part of Courland, Silesia, Lusatia, and Saxony were wrested from the Sarmatians, lying to the west and south-west.
It is not unusual to raise the two divisions of the great Sarmatian stock to the rank of separate substantive groups—independent of each other, though intimately allied. In this case Lithuania, Livonia, and Courland contain the smaller division, which is conveniently and generally called the Lithuanic; the population being agricultural, scanty, limited to the country in opposition to the towns, and unimportant in the way of history; a population, which in the tenth and eleventh centuries was cruelly conquered under the plea of Christianity by the German Knights of the Sword—rivals in rapacity and bloodshed to their equivalents of the Temple and St. John—a population which, at the present moment, lies like iron between the hammer and the anvil, between Russia and Prussia; and which, for one brief period only, under the Jagellons, exercised the equivocal rights of a dominant and encroaching family—for one brief period only within the true historical æra. How far it may have done more at an earlier epoch remains to be considered.
The other branch is the Slavonic; comprising the Russians, the Servians, the Illyrians, the Slovenians of Styria and Carinthia, the Slovaks of Hungary, the Tsheks of Bohemia, and the Lekhs (or Poles) of Poland, Mazovia, and Gallicia. A great deal is said about the future prospects of this stock; the doctrine of certain able historians being, that as they are the youngest of nations—a term somewhat difficult to define—and have played but a small part in the world’s history hitherto, they have a grand career before them; a prospect more glorious than that of the Romano-Keltic French, or the Germanic English of the Old and New World. I doubt the inference, and I doubt the fact on which it rests. But of this more anon. The Sarmatian Slavono-Lithuanians are the fourth great family of Europe. They certainly lie in the line of migration which peopled Ireland from Asia.
South of these lie two branches of a fresh stock, divided from each other, and presenting the difficult phænomenon of geographical discontinuity conjoined with ethnological affinity. Separated from the most southern Slavonians by the two intrusive populations of the Wallachians and the Majiars, and by the primitive family of the Albanians, come—
- a. The Greeks—and separated from the Slavonians of Carinthia and Bohemia by intrusive Germans at the present moment, and by the mysterious Etruscans in ancient times, come—
- b. The Italians.—We may call these two families Latin or Hellenic instead of Greek and Italian, if we choose; and as the distribution of nations is best studied during the earliest periods of their history, the former terms are the better.
Before we can consider the classification of these four families—Ugrian, Kelt, Gothic, and Græco-Latin—some fresh observations and certain new facts are requisite.
The ethnology of Europe is undoubtedly more difficult than that of any of the three other quarters of the globe—perhaps more so than that of all the world besides. It has not the character of being so—but so it is. The more we know the more we may know. Illustrated as is Europe by the historian and the antiquarian, it has its dark holes and corners made all the more visible from the illumination.
In the first place, the very fact of its being the home of the great historical nations has made it the scene of unparalleled displacements; for conquest is the great staple of history, and conquest and displacement are correlative terms. A greater portion of Europe can be shown to be held by either mixed or conquering nations than is to be found elsewhere—not that this absolutely proves the encroachments to have been greater; but that gives prominence to the greater degree in which they have been recorded. Hence, where in other parts of the world we shut up our papers and say de non apparentibus, &c., in Europe we are forced upon the obscurest investigations, and the subtlest trains of reasoning.
How great is this displacement? The history of only a few out of many of the conquering nations tells us a pregnant story in this respect. It shows us what has taken place within the comparatively brief span of the historical period. What lies beyond this it only suggests.
The Ugrians with one exception have ever suffered from the encroachments of others rather than been encroachers themselves. But the exception is a remarkable one.
It is that of the Majiars of Hungary, who, whatever claims they may set up for an extraction more illustrious than the one which they share with the Laplanders and Ostiaks, are unequivocally Ugrians—no Circassians, as has been vainly fancied, and no descendants from the Huns of Attila, as has been more reasonably supposed. This latter, however, is a supposition invalidated by the high probability of the warriors of the Scourge of God having been Turk.
Be this, however, as it may, their advent into Europe is no earlier than the tenth century, the country which they left having been the present domain of the Bashkirs.
The amount of displacement effected by the Kelts is difficult to determine. We hear of them in so many places that the family seems to be ubiquitous. Utterly disbelieving the Cimmerii of the Cimmerian Bosphorus to have been Keltic, and doubtful about both the Scordisci of the ancient Noricum, and the Celtiberians of ancient Spain, I am inclined to limit the Keltic area at its maximum extension, to Venice westwards, and to the neighbourhood of Rome southwards. But this is not enough. They may have been aboriginal in parts which they seem to have invaded as immigrants. This complicates the question and makes it as hard to ascertain the extent of their encroachments on others, as the extent to which others have encroached on them—a point for further notice.
The Goths have ever extended their frontier—a frontier which I believe to have once reached no farther than the Elbe[25]. From thence to the Niemen they have encroached at the expense of the Sarmatians—Slavonic or Lithuanic as the case may be.
In the time of Tacitus[25] it is highly probable that there were no Goths north of the Eyder. Since then, however, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have been wrested from earlier occupants and become Scandinavian.
The Ugrian family originally extended as far south as the Valdai Mountains. This part of their area is now Russian.
The conquests of Rome have given languages derived from the Latin to Northern Italy, the Grisons, France, Spain and Portugal, Wallachia and Moldavia.
This brings us to another question, that of—
Intermixture.—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 derivatives 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.
I have not fallen in with any evidence which induces me to consider the great Majiar invasion of Hungary as anything other than a simple military conquest. If so—and the reasoning applies to nine conquests out of ten—the female half of the ancestry of the present speakers of the Majiar language must have been the women of the country. These were Turk, Slavonic, Turko-Slavonic, Romano-Slavonic, and many other things besides—anything, in short, but Majiar.
The Grisons language is of Roman origin.
So is the Wallachian of Wallachia and Moldavia.
Nevertheless, in each country, the original population must be, more or less, represented in blood by the present.
This is enough to show what is meant by intermixture of blood, the extent to which it demands a special investigation of its own, and the number of such investigations required in the ethnology of Europe. Indeed, it is the subject of a special department of the science, conveniently called minute ethnology.
Identification of ancient nations, tribes, and families.—If there were no such thing as migration and displacement, the study of the ancient writers would be an easy matter. As it is, it is a very difficult one. Nine-tenths of the names of Herodotus, Strabo, Cæsar, Pliny, Tacitus, and similar writers on ethnology and geography, are not to be found in the modern maps; or, if found, occur in new localities. Such is the case with the name of our own nation, the Angli, who are now known as the people of Engl-land; whereas, in the eyes of Tacitus they were Germans. Others have not only changed place, but have become absolutely extinct. This is, of course, common enough. Again, the name itself may have changed, though the population to which it applies may have remained the same, or name and place may have each changed.
All this creates difficulties, though not such as should deter us from their investigation. At the same time, the criticism that must be applied is of a special and peculiar sort. One of the more complex questions with which it has to deal is the necessary but neglected preliminary of determining the language in which this or that geographical or ethnological name occurs; which is by no means an off-hand process. When Tacitus talks of Germans, or Herodotus of Scythians, the terms Scythian and German may or may not belong to the language of the people thus designated; in other words, they may or may not be native names—names known to the tribes to which the geographer applies them.
Generally such names are not native—a statement which, at first, seems hazardous; since the primâ facie view is in favour of the name by which a particular nation is known to its neighbours, being the name by which it characterizes itself. Do not our neighbours call themselves Français, whilst we say French, and are not the names identical? In this particular case they are; but the case is an exceptional one. Contrast with it that of the word Welsh. Welsh and Wales are the English names of the Cymry—English, but by no means native; English, but as little Welsh (strictly speaking) as the word Indian, when applied to the Red Men of America, is American.
Welsh is the name by which the Englishman denotes his fellow-citizens of the Principality. The German of Germany calls the Italians by the same designation; the same by which he knows the Wallachians also—since Wallachia and Wales and Welschland are all from the same root. What an error would it be to consider all these three countries as identical, simply because they were so in name! Yet if that name were native, such would be the inference. As it is, however, the chief link which connects them is their common relation to Germany (or Germanic England); a link which would have been wholly misinterpreted had we overlooked the German origin of the term, and erroneously referred it to the languages of the countries whereto it had its application.
An extract from Klaproth’s ‘Asia Polyglotta’ shall further illustrate this important difference between the name by which a nation is known to itself, and the name by which it is known to its geographer. A certain population of Siberia calls itself Nyenech or Khasovo. But none of its neighbours so call it. On the contrary, each gives it a different appellation.
| The | Obi-Ostiaks | call it | Jergan-Yakh. |
| „ | Tungúsians | „ | Dyândal. |
| „ | Syranians | „ | Yarang. |
| „ | Woguls | „ | Yarran-Kum. |
| „ | Russians | „ | Samöeid. |
What if some ancient tribe were thus polyonymous? What if five different writers of antiquity had derived their information from the five different nations of its neighbours? In such a case there would have been five terms to one object; none of them belonging to the language for which they were used.
The name, then, itself of each ancient population requires a preliminary investigation. And these names are numerous—more so in Europe than elsewhere.
The importance of the populations to which such names apply is greater in Europe than elsewhere. It is safe to say this; because there is a reason for it. From its excessive amount of displacement, Europe is that part of the world where there are the best grounds for believing in the previous existence of absolutely extinct families, or rather in the absolute extinction of families previously existing. There are no names in Asia that raise so many problems as those of the European Pelasgi and Etrurians.
The changes and complications involved in the foregoing observations (and they are but few out of many) are the results of comparatively recent movements; of conquests accomplished within the last twenty-five centuries; of migrations within (or nearly within) the historical period. Those truly ethnological phænomena which belong to the distribution itself of the existing families of Europe are, at least, of equal importance.
The most marked instances of philological isolation are European; the two chief specimens being the Basque and Albanian languages.
The Basque language of the Pyrenees has the same relation to the ancient language of the Spanish Peninsula that the present Welsh has to the old speech of Britain. It represents it in its fragments; fragments, whereof the preservation is due to the existence of a mountain stronghold for the aborigines to retire to. Now so isolated is this same Basque that there is no language in the world which is placed in the same class with it—no matter what the magnitude and import of that class may be.
The Albanian is just as isolated. As different from the Greek, Turkish and Slavonic tongues of the countries in its neighbourhood, as the Basque is from the French, Spanish and Breton, it is equally destitute of relations at a distance. It is unclassed—at least its position as Indo-European is doubtful.
What the Pelasgian and old Etruscan tongues were is uncertain. They were probably sufficiently different from the languages of their neighbourhood for the speakers of them to be mutually unintelligible. Beyond this, however, they may have been anything or nothing in the way of isolation. They may have been as peculiar as the Basque and Albanian. They may, on the other hand, have been just so unlike the Greek and Latin as to have belonged to another class—the value of that class being unascertained. Again, that class may or may not have existing representatives amongst the tongues at present existing. I give no opinion on this point. I only give prominence to the isolation of the Basque and Albanian. We know these last to be so different from each other, and from all other tongues, as to come under none of the recognized divisions in the way of ethnographical philology and its classifications.
Indo-Germanic.—This brings us to the term Indo-Germanic; and the term Indo-Germanic brings us to the retrospect of the European populations—all of which, now in existence, have been enumerated, but all of which have not been classified.
I. The Ugrians are a branch of the Turanians.
The Turanians form either a whole class or the part of one, according to the light in which we view them; in other words, the group has one value in philology, and another in anatomy. This is nothing extraordinary. It merely means that their speech has more prominent characters than their physical conformation.
I proceed, however, to our specification:—
- a. The Turanians in respect to their physical conformation are a branch of the Mongolians; the Chinese, Eskimo and others, being members of similar and equivalent divisions.
- b. In respect to their language, they are the highest group recognized, a group subordinate to none other.
To change the expression of this difference, the anatomical naturalist of the Human Species has in the word Mongolian a term of generality to which the philologist has not arrived.
II. The Greeks and Latins—the Sarmatians—and the Germans are referrible to a higher group; a group of much the same value as the Turanian.
The characteristics of this group are philological.
- a. The numerals of the three great divisions are alike.
- b. A large per-centage of the names of the commoner objects are alike.
- c. The signs of case in nouns, and of person in verbs, are alike.
So wide has been the geographical extent of the populations speaking languages thus connected (languages which separated from the common mother-tongue subsequent to the evolution of both the cases of nouns and the persons of verbs), that the literary language of India belongs to the class in question. Hence, when this fact became known, and when India passed for the eastern and Germany for the western extremity of the great area of this great tongue, the term Indo-Germanic became current.
But its currency was of no long duration. Dr. Prichard showed that the Keltic tongues had Indo-Germanic numerals, a certain per-centage of Indo-Germanic names for the commoner objects, and Indo-Germanic personal terminations of verbs. Since then, the Keltic has been considered as a fixed language, with a definite place in the classification of the philologist; and the term Indo-European[26], expressive of the class to which, along with the Sarmatian, the Gothic, and the Classical tongues of Greece and Italy, it belongs, has superseded the original compound Indo-Germanic.
We now know what is meant by Indo-European; a term of, at least, equal generality with the term Turanian.
- a. In physical conformation the Indo-Europeans are a branch of the higher division so improperly and inconveniently called Caucasian.
- b. In language they are the highest group hitherto recognized, a group subordinate to none other.
And we have also improved our measure of the isolation of the—
III. Basques.—Anatomically these are Caucasian so-called. Philologically, they are the only members of the group to which they belong, and that group is the highest recognized. They are like a species in natural history, which is the only one of its genus, the genus being the only one of its order, and the order being so indeterminate as to have no higher class to which it is subordinate.
IV. The Albanians are in the same predicament.
This is the state of classification which pre-eminently inspires us with the ambition of making higher groups; higher groups in philology, since in anatomy we have them ready-made—i. e. expressed by the terms Mongolian and Caucasian. The school which has made the most notable efforts in this way is the Scandinavian. In England it is, perhaps, better appreciated than in Germany, and in Germany better than in France.
I think it had great truth in fragments. It will first be considered on its philological side. Rask—the greatest genius for comparative philology that the world has seen—exhibited the germs of it in his work on the Zendavesta. Herein his hypothesis was as follows. The geologist will follow him with ease. Just as the later formations, isolated and unconnected of themselves, lie on an earlier, and comparatively continuous, substratum of secondary, palæozoic or primary antiquity, so do the populations speaking Celtic, Gothic, Slavonic, and Classical languages. Conquerors and encroachers wherever they came in contact with stocks alien to their own, they made, at an early period of history, nine-tenths of Europe and part of Asia their own. But before them lay an aboriginal population—before them in the way of time. This consisted of tribes, more or less related to each other, which filled Europe from the North Cape to Cape Comorin and Gibraltar—progenitors of the Laplanders on the north, and the progenitors of the Basques of the Pyrenees on the south—all at one time continuous. This time was the period anterior to the invasion of the oldest of the above-mentioned families. More than this—Hindostan was similarly peopled; and, by assumption, the parts between Northern Hindostan and Europe.
Such the theory. Now let us look to the present distribution. Almost all Europe is what is called Indo-European, i.e. Celtic, Gothic, Slavonic, or Classical. But it is not wholly so. In Scandinavia we have the Laps; in Northern Russia the Finns; on the junction of Spain and France the Basques. These are fragments of the once continuous Aborigines—separated from each other by Celts, Goths, and Slavonians. Then, as to India. In the Dekhan we have a family of languages called the Tamul—isolated also. Between each of these points the population is homogeneous as compared with itself; heterogeneous as compared with the tribes just enumerated. But there was once a continuity—even as the older rocks in geology are connected, whilst the newer ones are dissociated.
Such was the hypothesis of Rask; an hypothesis to which he applied the epithet Finnic—since the Finn of Finland was the type and sample of these early, aboriginal, hypothetically continuous, and hypothetically connected tongues. The invasion, however, of the stronger Indo-Europeans broke them up. Be it so. It was a grand guess; even if wrong, a grand and a suggestive one. Still it was but a guess. I will not say that no details were worked out. Some few were indicated.
Points which connected tongues so distant as the Tamul and the Finn were noticed—but more than this was not done. Still, it was a doctrine which, if it were proved false, was better than a large per-centage of the true ones. It taught inquirers where to seek the affinities of apparently isolated languages; and it bade them pass over those in the neighbourhood and look to the quarters where other tongues equally isolated presented themselves.
I have mentioned Rask as the apostle of it. Arndt, I am told, was the originator. The countrymen, however, of Rask have been those who have most acted on it.
But they took up the weapon at the other end. It is the anatomists and archæologists of Scandinavia who have worked it most. The Celts have a skull of their own just as they have a language. So have the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Dutch, and Englishmen. Never mind its characteristics. Suffice, that it was—or was supposed to be—different from that of the Finns and Basques. So had the Hindús—different from that of the Tamuls. Now the burial-places of the present countries of the different Gothic populations contain skulls of the Gothic character only up to a certain point. The very oldest stand in contrast with the oldest forms but one. The very oldest are Lap, Basque, and Tamul. Surely this—if true—confirms the philological theory. But is it true? I am not inclined to change the terms already used. It is a grand and a suggestive guess.
More than this it is not necessary to say at present; since any further speculation in respect to the migration (or migrations) which peopled Europe from the hypothetical centre in Asia is premature. The ethnology of Asia is necessary as a preliminary.
FOOTNOTES
[23] When ethnological medicine shall have become more extensively studied than it is, it will probably be seen that the populations of the area in question are those which are most afflicted by scrofula.
[24] A table showing this is printed in the author’s ‘Varieties of Man,’ pp. 270–272.
[25] Both these points are worked out in detail in the Author’s Taciti Germania, with ethnological notes.