337 See Strope, Description d’une Momie très-ancienne
(Recueil Périod. d’Observ. de Médecine, vol. iv, p. 290, Jan.
1756). One may see in reading the account of a very able and judicious
narrator how much ancient scientific observations alter with the times,
when no care is taken to refer to the original sources.
338 See Vivien, in the Mémoires de la Société
Ethnologique, vol. ii, p. 59.
340 W. Edwards, Des Caractères Physiologiques des races
humaines, p. 45, has especially noticed the great importance of
external characteristics; he has only done wrong in excluding the hair,
and attending solely to the form of the skull, which never concerns us
when we endeavour to picture or recall to our mind the features of a
man.
341 See Michelet, with regard to the paintings in the
Sixtine Chapel, Histoire de France, Renaissance.
342 “Philology is at once the most elevated and the most
positive branch of the natural history of the human race.” Chavée,
Moïse et les Langues (La Revue). M. Flourens seems to
give philological a superior rank to physical characteristics. [See
above, p. 77, note.—Editor.]
343 He believes that by their means we can go back to the
most distant geological periods. See Apophthegms (Edinburgh
New Philosophical Journ., vol. li.)
344 Latham thus explains it: “This is because whilst
A and B, in the way of stock-blood or pedigree, will
give C a true tertium quid, or a near approach to it,
and A and B, in the way of language, will only give
themselves, i. e., they will give no true tertium quid,
nor any very close approach to it.” Celtic Nations, p. 33. We
have endeavoured to prove that this true tertium quid—this
real mean term, is never produced as far as species.
345 [“Either language must have been originally revealed
from heaven, or it must be the fruits of human industry. The greater
part of Jews and Christians, and even some of the wisest Pagans,
have embraced the former opinion, which seems to be supported by the
authority of Moses, who represents the Supreme Being as teaching our
first parents the names of animals. The latter opinion is held
by Diodorus Siculus, Lucretius, Horace, and many other Greek and Roman
writers, who consider language as one of the arts invented by man. The
first men, say they, lived for some time in woods and caves, after
the manner of beasts, uttering only confused and indistinct noises,
till, associating for mutual assistance, they came by degrees to
use articulate sounds mutually agreed upon, for the arbitrary signs
or marks of those ideas in the mind of the speaker which he wanted
to communicate to the hearer. This opinion sprung from the atomic
cosmogony which was framed by Mochus, the Phœnician, and afterwards
improved by Democritus and Epicurus; and though it is part of a
system in which the first men are represented as having grown out of
the earth, like trees and other vegetables, it has been adopted by
several modern writers of high rank in the republic of letters, and is
certainly in itself worthy of examination.”—Encyclop. Brit.,
vol. ix, p. 530, 1797.—Editor.]
346 I do not here mention the opinions of the Swede (see
Latham, Celtic Nations, p. 2), who thinks that important changes
can be introduced into a language by certain customs of a people, who
change, for instance, the lips for the nostrils, and thus substitute
nasal for labial consonants. These facts are, perhaps, true in the
detail, but they ought not to have much importance, as they do not
alter the specific and personal character of the language, which is far
from consisting in the relative number of one or two kinds of letters.
347 Bunsen (Eng. transl.), Niebuhr’s Life and
Letters, vol. i, p. 39.
348 “Languages,” he says, “give but feeble probabilities
in Anthropology.” Voyage aux regions Equinoxiales du Nouveau
Continent, vol. iii, p. 352.
349 See, in the Mémoires de la Société Ethnologique
(July 1843), a letter in which M. Vivien denies a first rank to
language as a distinctive characteristic, and gives it to physical
type.
351 “I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this
philological barbarism is permitted me) do not resemble one another
because they come from the same parent, but because they have
been brought up together; Africa especially seems to me to furnish a
proof of it, for we must study the history of families of languages,
especially in the place where they began to be formed, and I believe
that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is not applicable
to all cases, but to several; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish,
etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death; but many other
languages appear to me to take their features one from the other by
simple frequentation, by the natives being often in company together,
and, as time goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages,
like the branches of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not
exist.”—Correspondence, 1857.
356 See Ethnographic Tableau (Indigenous Races of
the Earth, London, 1857).
357 We may quote, as types of genus, two paintings,
incomparable in an anthropological point of view, Portrait d’un
Nègre; Portrait d’un Oriental, by Herschop (Berlin Museum,
Nos. 825 and 827).
358 M. Flourens, in saying that Buffon collected the
accounts of different travellers in order to write his Histoire
des Races, adds, “Whatever they have only seen with the eyes of
their body, he sees with the eyes of his mind, and by that means
alone he sees better than they can; each of them has seen merely some
scattered characteristics,—Buffon sees everything; he links together
whatever they may have separated, and separates whatever they have
confounded.”—Histoire des Idées de Buffon, p. 167.
359 “Boni viri nullam oportet esse causam præter veritatem.”
360 [Yes, but the difficulty is to determine if it is
true. We cannot receive anything as true merely because a
savant says it is so. We must go on enquiring in a proper
spirit; but we must not put inquiry after truth in the same category
with scepticism,—“that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty
respecting anything and everything here on earth seems unattainable.”
This is the age for seeking after truth; but in how many different ways
do men endeavour to attain to it! We must search the past carefully in
all its scientific and natural facts, and as Longfellow beautifully
says,—