98. See (among other authorities), for the American aborigine, Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien, vol. i, p. 259; for the negroes, Pruner, Der Neger, eine aphoristische Skizze aus der medizinischen Topographie von Cairo, in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, vol. i, p. 131; for the muscular superiority of the white race over all the others, Carus, op. cit., p. 84.

99. Amédée Thierry, Histoire de la Gaule sous l’administration romaine, vol. i, p. 241.

100. One is sometimes led to consider the government of the United States of America as an original creation, peculiar to our time; its most remarkable feature is taken to be the small amount of opportunity left for Government initiative or even interference. Yet if we cast our eyes over the early years of all the States founded by the white race, we shall find exactly the same phenomenon. “Self-government” is no more triumphant in New York to-day, than it was in Paris at the time of the Franks. It is true that the Indians are treated far less humanely by the Americans than the Gallo-Romans were by the nobles of Chlodwig. But we must remember that the racial difference between the enlightened Republicans of the New World and their victims is far greater than that between the Germanic conqueror and those he conquered.

In fact, all Aryan societies began by exaggerating their independence as against the law and the magistrates.

The power of political invention possessed by the world cannot, I think, travel outside the boundaries traced by two particular peoples, one of them living in the north-east of Europe, the other on the banks of the Nile, in the extreme south of Egypt. The Government of the first of these peoples (in Bolgari, near Kazan) was accustomed to “order men of intelligence to be hanged” as a preventive measure. We owe our knowledge of this interesting fact to the Arabian traveller Ibn Foszlan (A. von Humboldt, Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 494). In the other nation, living at Fazoql, whenever the king did not give satisfaction, his relations and ministers came and told him so. They informed him that since he no longer pleased “the men, women, children, oxen, asses,” &c., the best thing he could do was to die; they then proceeded to help him to his death as speedily as possible (Lepsius, Briefe aus Ägypten, Äthiopien, und der Halbinsel des Sinai; Berlin, 1852).

101. Amédée Thierry, op. cit., vol. i, p. 241.

102. Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien, vol. iii, p. 950, &c.

103. In many tribes of Oceania the institution of marriage is conceived as follows:—A man sees a maiden, who, he thinks, will suit him. He obtains her from her father, by means of a few presents, among which a bottle of brandy, if he has been able to get one, holds the most distinguished place. Then the young suitor proceeds to conceal himself in a thicket, or behind a rock. The maiden passes by, thinking no harm. He knocks her down with a blow of his stick, beats her until she becomes unconscious, and carries her lovingly to his house, bathed in her blood. The formalities have been complied with, and the legal union is accomplished.

104. D’Orbigny tells how Indian mothers love their children to distraction, and take such care of them as to be really their slaves. If however the child annoys the mother at any time, then she drowns him or crushes him to death, or abandons him in the forest, without any regret. I know no other example of such an extraordinary change (D’Orbigny, L’Homme américain, vol. ii, p. 232).

105. “The native Indian trade in books is very active, and many of the works produced are never seen in the libraries of Europeans, even in India. Sprenger says, in a letter, that in Lucknow alone there are thirteen lithographic establishments occupied purely in printing school-books, and he gives a considerable list of works of which probably not one has reached Europe. The same is the case at Delhi, Agra, Cawnpore, Allahabad, and other towns” (Mohl, Rapport annuel à la Société asiatique, 1851, p. 92).

106. “The Siamese are the most shameless people in the world. They are at the lowest point of Indo-Chinese civilization; and yet they can all read and write” (Ritter, Erdkunde, Asien, vol. iii, p. 1152).

107. Prichard, “Natural History of Man,” sec. 41.

108. King of Palmyra in Syria, and husband of Zenobia. He was recognized by the Emperor Gallienus as co-regent of the East in 267, and was murdered in the same year.—Tr.

109. “The impulse towards this science given them by their kinship with the Græco-Syrians made them capable of really absorbing the Greek language and spirit; for the Arabs preferred to confine themselves to the purely scientific results of Greek speculation” (W. von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. cclxiii).

110. The severest judgment on the negro that has perhaps been passed up to now comes from one of the pioneers of the doctrine of equality. Franklin defines the negro as “an animal who eats as much, and works as little, as possible.”

111. I have no hesitation in regarding the exaggerated development of instinct among savage races as a specific mark of intellectual inferiority. The sharpening of certain senses can only be gained by the deterioration of the mental facilities. On this point, compare what Lesson says of the Papuans, in a paper printed in the Annales des sciences naturelles, vol. x.

112. See p. 139.

113. W. von Humboldt, in one of the most brilliant of his minor works, has admirably expressed this fact, in its essentials. “In language,” he says, “the work of time is helped everywhere by national idiosyncrasies. The characteristic features in the idioms of the warrior hordes of America and Northern Asia were not necessarily those of the primitive races of India and Greece. It is not possible to trace a perfectly equal, and as it were natural, development of any language, whether it was spoken by one nation or many” (W. von Humboldt, Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen, und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwickelung).

114. W. von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction.

115. I am inclined to believe that the monosyllabic quality of Chinese is not really a specific mark of the language at all; and though a striking characteristic, it does not seem to be an essential one. If it were, Chinese would be an “isolating” language, connected with others having the same structure. We know that this is not so. Chinese belongs to the Tatar or Finnish system, of which some branches are polysyllabic. On the other hand, we find monosyllabic languages among groups with quite a different origin. I do not lay any stress on the example of Othomi, a Mexican dialect which, according to du Ponceau, has the monosyllabic quality of Chinese, and yet in other respects belongs to the American family among which it is found, as Chinese does to the Tatar group (see Morton, “An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the aboriginal race of America,” Philadelphia, 1844). My reason for neglecting this apparently important example is that these American languages may one day be recognized as forming merely a vast branch of the Tatar family; and thus any conclusion I might draw from them would simply go to confirm what I have said as to the relation of Chinese to the surrounding dialects, a relation which is in no way disproved by the peculiar character of Chinese itself.

I find therefore a more conclusive instance in Coptic, which will not easily be shown to have any relation to Chinese. But here also every syllable is a root; and the simple affixes that modify the root are so independent that even the determining particle that marks the time of the verb does not always remain joined to the word. Thus hon means “to command”; a-hon, “he commanded”; but a Moyses hon, “Moses commanded” (see E. Meier, Hebräisches Wurzelwörterbuch).

Thus it seems possible for monosyllabism to appear in every linguistic family. It is a kind of infirmity produced by causes which are not yet understood; it is not however a specific feature, separating the language in which it occurs from the rest, and setting it in a class by itself.

116. Goethe says in Wilhelm Meister: “Few Germans, and perhaps few men of modern nations, have the sense of an æsthetic whole. We only know how to praise and blame details, we can only show a fragmentary admiration.”

117. Cf. W. von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xcv: “We may call the sound that imitates the meaning of a word symbolic, although the symbolic element in speech goes far deeper than this.... This kind of imitation undoubtedly had a great, and perhaps exclusive, influence over the early attempts at word-building.”

118. There is probably another jargon of the same kind as Balaïbalan. This is called “Afnskoë,” and is spoken by the pedlars and horse-dealers of Greater Russia, especially in the province of Vladimir. It is confined to men. The grammar is entirely Russian, though the roots are foreign. (See Pott, Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopädie, Indogermanischer Sprachstamm, p. 110.)

119. C. O. Müller, in an admirable passage which I cannot resist the temptation of transcribing, shows the true nature of language: “Our age has learnt, by the study of the Hindu and especially the Germanic languages, that the laws of speech are as fixed as those of organic life. Between different dialects, developing independently after their separation, there are still mysterious links, which reciprocally determine the sounds and their sequences. Literature and science set limits to this growth, and arrest perhaps some of its richer developments; but they cannot impose any law on it higher than that ordained by nature, mother of all things. Even a long time before the coming of decadence and bad taste, languages may fall sick, from outward or inward causes, and suffer vast changes; but so long as life remains in them, their innate power is enough to heal their wounds, to set their torn limbs, and to restore unity and regularity, even when the beauty and perfection of the noble plants has almost entirely disappeared” (Die Etrusker, p. 65).

120. Pott, op. cit., p. 74.

121. That the mixture of idioms is proportionate to that of the races constituting a nation had already been noticed before philology, in the modern sense, existed at all. Kämpfer for example says in his “History of Japan” (published in 1729): “We may take it as a fixed rule that the settlement of foreigners in a country will bring a corresponding proportion of foreign words into the language; these will be naturalized by degrees, and become as familiar as the native words themselves.”

122. Keferstein shows that German is merely a hybrid language made up of Celtic and Gothic (Ansichten über die keltischen Altertümer, Halle, 1846–51; Introduction, p. xxxviii). Grimm is of the same opinion.

123. W. von Humboldt says: “Languages, that are apparently crude and unrefined, may show some striking qualities in their structure, and often do so. In this respect they may quite possibly surpass more highly developed tongues. The comparison of Birman with Delaware, not to speak of Mexican, can leave no doubt of the superiority of the latter; yet a strand of Indian culture has certainly been interwoven into Birman by Pali” (Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xxxiv).

124. This difference of level between the intellect of the conqueror and that of the conquered is the cause of the “sacred languages” that we find used in the early days of an empire; such as that of the Egyptians, or the Incas of Peru. These languages are the object of a superstitious veneration; they are the exclusive property of the upper classes, and often of a sacerdotal caste, and they furnish the strongest possible proof of the existence of a foreign race that has conquered the country where they are found.

125. W. von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xxxiv.

126. See p. 82 above.

127. Ancient Greece contained many dialects, but not so many as the Greece of the sixteenth century, when seventy were counted by Simeon Kavasila; further we may notice (in connexion with the following paragraph) that in the thirteenth century French was spoken throughout Greece, and especially in Attica (Heilmayer, quoted by Pott, op. cit., p. 73).

128. The Hebrews themselves did not call their language “Hebrew”; they called it, quite properly, the “language of Canaan” (Isaiah xix, 18). Compare Roediger’s preface to the Hebrew grammar of Gesenius (16th edition, Leipzig, 1851, p. 7 et passim).

129. This is also the view of W. Edwards (“Physical Characteristics of the Human Races”).

130. Besides the Jews, I might also mention the Gipsies. There is, further, the case where a people speaks two languages. In Grisons almost all the peasants of the Engadine speak Roumansch and German with equal facility, the former among themselves, the latter to foreigners. In Courland there is a district where the peoples speak Esthonian (a Finnish dialect) to each other and Lithuanian to every one else (Pott, op. cit., p. 104).

131. See pp. 97–102.

132. The way was not so long from rustic Latin, lingua rustica Romanorum, to the lingua romana and thence to corruption, as it was from the classical tongue, the precise and elaborate forms of which offered more resistance to decay. We may add that, as every foreign legionary brought his own provincial patois into the Gallic colonies, the advent of a common dialect was hastened, not merely by the Celts, but by the immigrants themselves.

133. Sulp. Severus, Dial. I de virtutibus monachorum orientalium.

134. Both troubadours who flourished in the latter half of the twelfth century.—Tr.

135. Macaulay, “History of England,” ad init. The Albigenses are the special favourites of revolutionary writers, especially in Germany (see Lenau’s poem, Die Albigenser). Nevertheless the sectaries of Languedoc were recruited mainly from the knightly orders and the dignitaries of the Church. Their doctrines were indeed anti-social; and for this reason much may be pardoned to them.

136. See the curious remarks of Génin in his preface to the Chanson de Roland (edited 1851).

137. See Hickes, Thesaurus litteraturæ septentrionalis; also L’Histoire littéraire de France, vol. xvii, p. 633.

138. Published in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

139. P. Pâris, Garin le Loherain, preface.

140. It may however be observed that the accent of Vaud and Savoy has a southern ring, strongly reminiscent of the colony of Aventicum.

141. See p. 43.

142. Pott brings out very well the fact that the different dialects maintain the balance between the blood of a race and its language, when he says, “Dialects are the diversity in unity, the prismatic sections of the monochromatic light and the primordial One” (Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopädie, p. 66). The phraseology is obscure; but it shows his meaning clearly enough.

143. This caution applies only when the history of a single people is in question, not that of a group of peoples. Although one nation may sometimes change its language, this never happens, and could not happen, in the case of a complex of nationalities, racially identical though politically independent. The Jews have given up their national speech; but the Semitic nations as a whole can neither lose their native dialects nor acquire others.

144. “Taste and smell in the negro are as powerful as they are undiscriminating. He eats everything, and odours which are revolting to us are pleasant to him” (Pruner).

145. Carus, op. cit., p. 60.

146. Martius observes that the European is superior to the coloured man in the pressure of the nervous fluid (Reise in Brasilien, vol. i, p. 259).