ANTHROPOLOGY.

ANTHROPOLOGY

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF
MAN AND CIVILIZATION.

BY
EDWARD B. TYLOR, D.C.L., F.R.S.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1881.

The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.

London:
R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C.

PREFACE.

In times when subjects of education have multiplied, it may seem at first sight a hardship to lay on the already heavily-pressed student a new science. But it will be found that the real effect of Anthropology is rather to lighten than increase the strain of learning. In the mountains we see the bearers of heavy burdens contentedly shoulder a carrying-frame besides, because they find its weight more than compensated by the convenience of holding together and balancing their load. So it is with the science of Man and Civilization, which connects into a more manageable whole the scattered subjects of an ordinary education. Much of the difficulty of learning and teaching lies in the scholar’s not seeing clearly what each science or art is for, what its place is among the purposes of life. If he knows something of its early history, and how it arose from the simpler wants and circumstances of mankind, he finds himself better able to lay hold of it than when, as too often happens, he is called on to take up an abstruse subject not at the beginning but in the middle. When he has learnt something of man’s rudest means of conversing by gestures and cries, and thence has been led to see how the higher devices of articulate speech are improvements on such lower methods, he makes a fairer start in the science of language than if he had fallen unprepared among the subtleties of grammar, which unexplained look like arbitrary rules framed to perplex rather than to inform. The dislike of so many beginners to geometry as expounded by Euklid, the fact that not one out of three ever really understands what he is doing, is of all things due to the scholar not being shown first the practical common-sense starting point, where the old carpenters and builders began to make out the relations of distances and spaces in their work. So the law-student plunges at once into the intricacies of legal systems which have grown up through the struggles, the reforms, and even the blunders of thousands of years; yet he might have made his way clearer by seeing how laws begin in their simplest forms, framed to meet the needs of savage and barbaric tribes. It is needless to make a list of all the branches of education in knowledge and art; there is not one which may not be the easier and better learnt for knowing its history and place in the general science of Man.

With this aim in view, the present volume is an introduction to Anthropology, rather than a summary of all it teaches. It does not deal with strictly technical matter, out of the reach of readers who have received, or are receiving, the ordinary higher English education. Thus, except to students trained in anatomy, the minute modern researches as to distinction of races by skull measurements and the like would be useless. Much care has been taken to make the chapters on the various branches of the science sound as far as they go, but the more advanced work must be left to special students.

While the various departments of the science of Man are extremely multifarious, ranging from body to mind, from language to music, from fire-making to morals, they are all matters to whose nature and history every well-informed person ought to give some thought. It is much, however, for any single writer to venture to deal even in the most elementary way with so immense a variety of subjects. In such a task I have the right to ask that errors and imperfections should be lightly judged. I could not have attempted it at all but for the help of friends eminent in various branches of the science, whom I have been able to consult on doubtful and difficult points. My acknowledgments are especially due to Professor Huxley and Dr. E. A. Freeman, Sir Henry Maine, Dr. Birch, Mr. Franks, Professor Flower, Major-General Pitt-Rivers, Professor Sayce, Dr. Beddoe, Dr. D. H. Tuke, Professor W. K. Douglas, Mr. Russell Martineau, Mr. R. Garnett, Mr. Henry Sweet, Mr. Rudler, and many other friends whom I can only thank unnamed. The illustrations of races are engraved from photographic portraits, many of them taken by the permission of Messrs. Dammann of Huddersfield from their valuable Albums of Ethnological Photographs.

F. B. T.

February, 1881.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

ANTHROPOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.
MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

Antiquity of Man, [1]—Time required for Development of Races, [1]—of Languages, [7]—of Civilization, [13]—Traces of Man in the Stone Age, [25]—Later Period, [26]—Earlier Quaternary or Drift-Period, [29].

The student who seeks to understand how mankind came to be as they are, and to live as they do, ought first to know clearly whether men are new-comers on the earth, or old inhabitants. Did they appear with their various races and ways of life ready-made, or were these shaped by the long, slow growth of ages? In order to answer this question, our first business will be to take a rapid survey of the varieties of men, their languages, their civilization, and their ancient relics, to see what proofs may thus be had of man’s age in the world. The outline sketch thus drawn will also be useful as an introduction to the fuller examination of man and his ways of life in the chapters which follow.

First, as to the varieties of mankind. Let us suppose ourselves standing at the docks in Liverpool or London, looking at groups of men of races most different from our own. There is the familiar figure of the African negro, with skin so dark-brown as to be popularly called black, and black hair so naturally frizzed as to be called woolly. Nor are these the only points in which he is unlike us. Indeed, the white men who blacken their faces and friz their hair to look like negros make a very poor imitation, for the negro features are quite distinct; we well know the flat nose, wide nostrils, thick protruding lips, and, when the face is seen in profile, the remarkable projecting jaws. A hatter would at once notice that the negro’s head is narrower in proportion than the usual oval of the hats made for Englishmen. It would be possible to tell a negro from a white man even in the dark by the peculiar satiny feel of his skin, and the yet more peculiar smell which no one who has noticed it is ever likely to mistake. In the same docks, among the crews of Eastern steamers, we observe other well-marked types of man. The Coolie of South India (who is not of Hindu race, but belongs to the so-called hill-tribes,) is dark-brown of skin, with black, silky, wavy hair, and a face wide-nosed, heavy-jawed, fleshy-lipped. More familiar is the Chinese, whom the observer marks down by his less than European stature, his jaundice-yellow skin, and coarse, straight black hair; the special character of his features is neatly touched off on his native china-plates and paper-screens which show the snub nose, high cheek-bones, and that curious slanting set of the eyes which we can imitate by putting a finger near the outer corners of our own eyes and pushing upward. By comparing such a set of races with our own countrymen, we are able to make out the utmost differences of complexion and feature among mankind. While doing so, it is plain that white men, as we agree to call ourselves, show at least two main race-types. Going on board a merchant-ship from Copenhagen, we find the crew mostly blue-eyed men of fair complexion and hair, a remarkable contrast to the Genoese vessel moored alongside, whose sailors show almost to a man swarthy complexions and lustrous black eyes and hair. These two types of man have been well described as the fair-whites and the dark-whites.

It is only within modern times that the distinctions among races have been worked out by scientific methods. Yet since early ages, race has attracted notice from its connexion with the political questions of countryman or foreigner, conqueror or conquered, freeman or slave, and in consequence its marks have been watched with jealous accuracy. In the Southern United States, till slavery was done away a few years ago, the traces of negro descent were noted with the utmost nicety. Not only were the mixed breeds regularly classed as mulattos, quadroons, and down to octaroons, but even where the mixture was so slight that the untrained eye noticed nothing beyond a brunette complexion, the intruder who had ventured to sit down at a public dinner-table was called upon to show his hands, and the African taint detected by the dark tinge at the root of the finger-nails.

Seeing how striking the broad distinctions of race are, it was to be expected that ancient inscriptions and figures should give some view of the races of man as they were at the beginning of historical times. It is so in Egypt, where the oldest writings of the world appear. More than 4,000 years ago we begin to find figures of the Egyptians themselves, in features much the same as in later times. In the sixth dynasty, about 2,000 B.C., the celebrated inscription of Prince Una makes mention of the Nahsi, or negroes, who were levied and drilled by ten thousands for the Egyptian army. Under the twelfth dynasty, on the walls of the tomb of Knumhetp, there is represented a procession of Amu, who are seen by their features to be of the race to which Syrians and Hebrews belonged. Especially the wall-paintings of the tombs of the kings at Thebes, of the nineteenth dynasty, have preserved coloured portraits of the four great races distinguished by the Egyptians. These are the red-brown Egyptians themselves, the people of Palestine with their aquiline profile and brownish complexion, the flat-nosed, thick-lipped African negroes, and the fair-skinned Libyans. Thus mankind was already divided into well-marked races, distinguished by colour and features. It is surprising to notice how these old-world types of man are still to be recognised. The Ethiopian of the ancient monuments can at this day be closely matched. Notwithstanding the many foreign invasions of Egypt, the mass of the village population is true-bred enough for men to be easily picked out as representatives of the times of the Pharaohs. Their portraits have only to be drawn in the stiff style of the monuments, with the eye conventionally shown full-front in the profile face, and we have before us the very Egyptians as they depicted themselves in the old days when they held the Israelites in bondage. In the same way, the ancient Egyptian portraits of captives from Palestine, whether Syrians, Phœnicians, or Hebrews, show the strongly-marked Israelite type of features to be seen at this day in every city of Europe. Altogether, the evidence of ancient monuments, geography and history, goes to prove that the great race-divisions of mankind are of no recent growth, but were already settled before the beginning of the historical period. Since then their changes seem to have been comparatively slight, except in the forming of mixed races by intermarriage.

Hence it follows that the historic ages are to be looked on as but the modern period of man’s life on earth. Behind them lies the præhistoric period, when the chief work was done of forming and spreading over the world the races of mankind. Though there is no scale to measure the length of this period by, there are substantial reasons for taking it as a long stretch of time. Looking at an ethnological map, coloured to show what race of men inhabits each region, it is plain at a glance that the world was not peopled by mere chance scattering of nations, a white tribe here and a brown tribe there, with perhaps a black tribe in between. Far from this, whole races are spread over vast regions as though they grew there, and the peculiar type of the race seems more or less connected with the climate it lives in. Especially it is seen that the mass of black races belong to the equatorial regions in Africa and the Eastern Archipelago, the yellow race to Central and Southern Asia, the white race to temperate Asia and Europe. Some guess may even be made from the map which district was the primitive centre where each of these races took shape, and whence it spread far and wide. Now if, as some have thought, the Negros, Mongolians, Whites, and other races, were distinct species, each sprung from a separate origin in its own region, then the peopling of the globe might require only a moderate time, the races having only to spread each from its own birthplace. But the opinion of modern zoologists, whose study of the species and breeds of animals makes them the best judges, is against this view of several origins of man, for two principal reasons. First, that all tribes of men, from the blackest to the whitest, the most savage to the most cultured, have such general likeness in the structure of their bodies and the working of their minds, as is easiest and best accounted for by their being descended from a common ancestry, however distant. Second, that all the human races, notwithstanding their form and colour, appear capable of freely intermarrying and forming crossed races of every combination, such as the millions of mulattos and mestizos sprung in the New World from the mixture of Europeans, Africans, and native Americans; this again points to a common ancestry of all the races of man. We may accept the theory of the unity of mankind as best agreeing with ordinary experience and scientific research. As yet, however, the means are very imperfect of judging what man’s progenitors were like in body and mind, in times before the forefathers of the present Negros, and Tatars, and Australians, had become separated into distinct stocks. Nor is it yet clear by what causes these stocks or races passed into their different types of skull and limbs, of complexion and hair. It cannot be at present made out how far the peculiarities of single ancestors were inherited by their descendants and became stronger by in-breeding; how far, when the weak and dull-witted tribes failed in the struggle for land and life, the stronger, braver, and abler tribes survived to leave their types stamped on the nations sprung from them; how far whole migrating tribes underwent bodily alteration through change of climate, food, and habits, so that the peopling of the earth went on together with the growth of fresh races fitted for life in its various regions. Whatever share these causes and others yet more obscure may have had in varying the races of man, it must not be supposed that such differences as between an Englishman and a Gold Coast negro are due to slight variations of breed. On the contrary, they are of such zoological importance as to have been compared with the differences between animals which naturalists reckon distinct species, as between the brown bear with its rounded forehead, and the polar bear with its whitish fur and long flattened skull. If then we are to go back in thought to a time when the ancestors of the African, the Australian, the Mongol, and the Scandinavian, were as yet one undivided stock, the theory of their common descent must be so framed as to allow causes strong enough and time long enough to bring about changes far beyond any known to have taken place during historical ages. Looked at in this way, the black, brown, yellow, and white men whom we have supposed ourselves examining on the quays, are living records of the remote past, every Chinese and Negro bearing in his face evidence of the antiquity of man.

Next, what has language to tell of man’s age on the earth? It appears that the distinct languages known number about a thousand. It is clear, however, at the first glance that these did not all spring up separately. There are groups of languages which show such close likeness in their grammars and dictionaries as proves each group to be descended from one ancestral tongue. Such a group is called a family of languages, and one of the best known of such families may be taken as an example of their way of growth. In ancient times Latin (using the word in a rather wide sense) was the language of Rome and other Italian districts, and with the spread of the Roman empire it was carried far and wide, so as to oust the early languages of whole provinces. Undergoing in each land a different course of change, Latin gave rise to the Romance family of languages, of which Italian, Spanish, and French are well-known members. How these languages have come to differ after ages of separate life, we judge by seeing that sailors from Dieppe cannot make themselves understood in Malagà, nor does a knowledge of French enable us to read Dante. Yet the Romance languages keep the traces of their Roman origin plainly enough for Italian, Spanish, and French sentences to be taken and every word referred to something near it in classical Latin, which may be roughly treated as the original form. Familiar proverbs are here given as illustrations, with the warning to the reader that, for convenience’ sake, the comparisons are not all carried out in precise grammatical form.

Italian.

E meglio un uovo oggi che una gallina domani.
est melius unum ovum hodie quid una gallina de mane.
i.e. Better is an egg to-day than a hen to-morrow.

Chi va piano va sano, chi va sano va lontano.
qui vadit planum vadit sanum, qui vadit sanum vadit longum.
i.e. He who goes gently goes safe, he who goes safe goes far.

Spanish.

Quien canta sus males espanta.
quem cantat suos malos expav(ere).
i.e. He who sings frightens away his ills.

Por la calle de despues se va á la casa de nunca.
per illam callem de de-ex-post se vadit ad illam casam de nunquam.
i.e. By the street of by and by one goes to the house of never.

French.

Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.
unum tene valet melius quod duos tu illum habere-habes.
i.e. One take-it is worth more than two thou-shalt-have-its.

Parler de la corde dans la maison d’un pendu.
parabola de illam chordam de intus illam mansionem de unum pend(o).
i.e. (Never to) talk of a rope in the house of a hanged man.

It is plain on the face of such sentences as these, that Italian, Spanish, and French are in fact transformed Latin, their words having been gradually altered as they descended, generation after generation, from the parent tongue. Now even if Latin were lost, philologists would still be able, by comparing the set of Romance languages, to infer that such a language must have existed to give rise to them all, though no doubt such a reconstruction of Latin would give but a meagre notion, either of its stock of words or its grammatical inflexions. This kind of argument by which a lost parent-language is discovered from the likeness among its descendants, may be well seen in another set of European tongues. Let us suppose ourselves listening to a group of Dutch sailors; at first their talk may seem unintelligible, but after a while a sharp ear will catch the sound of well known words, and perhaps at last whole sentences like these:—Kom hier! Wat zegt gij? Hoe is het weder? Het is een hevige storm, ik ben zeer koud. Is de maan op? Ik weet niet. The spelling of these words, different from our mode, disguises their resemblance, but as spoken they come very near corresponding sentences in English, somewhat old-fashioned or provincial, thus:—Come here! What say ye? How is the weather? It is a heavy storm, I be sore cold. Is the moon up? I wit not. Now it stands to reason that no two languages could have come to be so like, unless both were descended from one parent tongue. The argument is really much like that as to the origin of the people themselves. As we say, these Dutch and English are beings so nearly alike that they must have descended from a common stock, so we say, these languages are so like that they must have been derived from a common language. Dutch and English are accordingly said to be closely related to one another, and the language of Friesland proves on examination to be another near relative. Thence it is inferred that a parent language or group of dialects, which may be called the original Low-Dutch, or Low-German, must once have been spoken, though it is not actually to be found, not happening to have been written down and so preserved.

Now it is easy to see that as ages go on, and the languages of a family each take their separate course of change, it must become less and less possible to show their relationship by comparing whole sentences. Philologists have to depend on less perfect resemblances, but such are sufficient when not only words from the dictionary correspond in the two languages, but also these are worked up into actual speech by corresponding forms of grammar. Thus when Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Brahmans in India, is compared with Greek and Latin, it appears that the Sanskrit verb dâ expresses the idea to give, and makes its present tense by reduplicating and adding a person-affix, so becoming dadâmi, nearly as Greek makes didōmi: from the same root Sanskrit makes a future participle dâsyamânas, corresponding to Greek dōsomenos, while Sanskrit dâtâr matches Greek dotēr = giver. So where Latin has vox, vocis, vocem, voces, vocum, vocibus, Sanskrit has vâk, vâćas, vâćam, vâćas, vâćâm, vâgbhyas. When such thoroughgoing analogy as this is found to run through several languages, as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, no other explanation is possible but that an ancient parent language gave rise to them all, they having only varied off from it in different directions. In this way it is shown that not only are these particular languages related by descent, but that groups of ancient and modern languages in Asia and Europe, the Indian group, the Persian group, the Hellenic or Greek group, the Italic or Latin group, the Slavonic group to which Russian belongs, the Teutonic group which English is a member of, the Keltic group which Welsh is a member of, are all descendants of one common ancestral language, which is now theoretically called the Aryan, though practically its nature can only be made out in a vague way by comparing its descendant languages. Some of these have come down to us in forms which are extremely ancient, as antiquity goes in our limited chronology. The sacred books of India and Persia have preserved the Sanskrit and Zend languages, which by their structure show to the eye of the philologist an antiquity beyond that of the earliest Greek and Latin inscriptions and the old Persian cuneiform rock-writing of Darius. But the Aryan languages even in their oldest known states had already become so different that it was the greatest feat of modern philology to demonstrate that they had a common origin at all. The faint likeness by which Welsh still shows its relationship to Greek and German may give some idea of the time that may have elapsed since all three were developed off from the original Aryan tongue, which itself probably ceased to exist long before the historical period began.

Among the languages of ancient nations, another great group holds a high place in the world’s history. This is the Semitic family which includes the Hebrew and Phœnician, and the Assyrian deciphered from the wedge-characters of Nineveh. Arabic, the language of the Koran, is the great modern representative of the family, and the closeness with which it matches Hebrew may be shown in familiar phrases. The Arab still salutes the stranger with salâm alaikum, “peace upon you,” nearly as the ancient Hebrew would have said shâlôm lâchem, that is, “peace to you,” and the often-heard Arabic exclamation bismillah may be turned into Hebrew, as be-shêm hâ-Elohim, “in the name of God.” So the Hebrew names of persons mentioned in the Bible give the interpretation of many Arabic proper names, as where Ebed-melech, “servant of the king,” who took Jeremiah out of the dungeon, bore a name nearly like that of the khalif Abd-el-Melik, in Mohammedan history. But no one of these Semitic languages has any claim to be the original of the family, standing to the others as Latin does to Italian and French. All of them, Assyrian, Phœnician, Hebrew, Arabic, are sister-languages, pointing back to an earlier parent language which has long disappeared. The ancient Egyptian language of the hieroglyphics cannot be classed as a member of the Semitic family, though it shows points of resemblance which may indicate some remote connexion. There are also known to have existed before 2000 B.C. two important languages not belonging to either the Aryan or Semitic family; these were the ancient Babylonian and the ancient Chinese. As for the languages of more outlying regions of the world, such as America, when they come into view they are found likewise to consist of many separate groups or families.

This slight glimpse of the earliest known state of language in the world is enough to teach the interesting lesson that the main work of language-making was done in the ages before history. Going back as far as philology can take us, we find already existing a number of language-groups, differing in words and structure, and if they ever had any relationship with one another no longer showing it by signs clear enough for our skill to make out. Of an original primitive language of mankind, the most patient research has found no traces. The oldest types of language we can reach by working back from known languages show no signs of being primitive tongues of mankind. Indeed, it may be positively asserted that they are not such, but that ages of growth and decay have mostly obliterated the traces how each particular sound came to express its particular sense. Man, since the historical period, has done little in the way of absolute new creation of language, for the good reason that his wants were already supplied by the words he learnt from his fathers, and all he had to do when a new idea came to him was to work up old words into some new shape. Thus the study of languages gives much the same view of man’s antiquity as has been already gained from the study of races. The philologist, asked how long he thinks mankind to have existed, answers that it must have been long enough for human speech to have grown from its earliest beginnings into elaborate languages, and for these in their turn to have developed into families spread far and wide over the world. This immense work had been already accomplished in ages before the earliest inscriptions of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Phœnicia, Persia, Greece, for these show the great families of human speech already in full existence.

Next, we have to look at culture or civilization, to see whether this also shows signs of man having lived and laboured in ages earlier than the earliest which historical records can tell of. For this purpose it is needful to understand what has been the general course of arts, knowledge, and institutions. It is a good old rule to work from the known to the unknown, and all intelligent people have much to tell from their own experience as to how civilization develops. The account which an old man can give of England as he remembers it in his schoolboy days, and of the inventions and improvements he has seen come in since, is in itself a valuable lesson. Thus, when starting from London by express train to reach Edinburgh by dinner-time, he thinks of when it used to be fair coach-travelling to get through in two days and nights. Catching sight of a signal-post on the line, he remembers how such semaphores (that is, sign-bearers) were then the best means of telegraphing, and stood waving their arms on the hills between London and Plymouth, signalling the Admiralty messages. Thinking of the electric telegraph which has superseded them, reminds him that this invention arose out of a discovery made in his youth as to the connexion between electricity and magnetism. This again suggests other modern scientific discoveries that have opened to us the secrets of the universe, such as the spectrum-analysis which now makes out with such precision the materials of the stars, which is just what our fathers were quite certain no man on earth ever could know. Our informant can tell us, too, how knowledge has not only increased, but is far more widely spread than formerly, when the thriving farmer’s son could hardly get schooling practically so good as the labourer’s son is now entitled to of right. He may then go on to explain to his hearers how, since his time, the laws of the land have been improved and better carried out, so that men are no longer hanged for stealing, that more is done to reform the criminal classes instead of merely punishing them, that life and property are safer than in old times. Last, but not least, he can show from his own recollection that people are morally a shade better than they were, that public opinion demands a somewhat higher standard of conduct than in past generations, as may be seen in the sharper disapproval that now falls on cheats and drunkards. From such examples of the progress in civilization that has come in a single country and a single lifetime, it is clear that the world has not been standing still with us, but new arts, new thoughts, new institutions, new rules of life, have arisen or been developed out of the older state of things.

Now this growth or development in civilization, so rapid in our own time, appears to have been going on more or less actively since the early ages of man. Proof of this comes to us in several different ways. History, so far as it reaches back, shows arts, sciences, and political institutions beginning in ruder states, and becoming in the course of ages more intelligent, more systematic, more perfectly arranged or organized, to answer their purposes. Not to give many instances of a fact so familiar, the history of parliamentary government begins with the old-world councils of the chiefs and tumultuous assemblies of the whole people. The history of medicine goes back to the times when epilepsy or “seizure” (Greek, epilēpsis) was thought to be really the act of a demon seizing and convulsing the patient. But our object here is to get beyond such ordinary information of the history books, and to judge what stages civilization passed through in times yet earlier. Here one valuable aid is archæology, which for instance shows us the stone hatchets and other rude instruments which belonged to early tribes of men, thus proving how low their state of arts was; of this more will be said presently. Another useful guide is to be had from survivals in culture. Looking closely into the thoughts, arts, and habits of any nation, the student finds everywhere the remains of older states of things out of which they arose. To take a trivial example, if we want to know why so quaintly cut a garment as the evening dress-coat is worn, the explanation may be found thus. The cutting away at the waist had once the reasonable purpose of preventing the coat skirts from getting in the way in riding, while the pair of useless buttons behind the waist are also relics from the times when such buttons really served the purpose of fastening these skirts behind; the curiously cut collar keeps the now misplaced notches made to allow of its being worn turned up or down, the smart facings represent the old ordinary lining, and the sham cuffs now made with a seam round the wrist are survivals from real cuffs when the sleeve used to be turned back. Thus it is seen that the present ceremonial dress-coat owes its peculiarities to being descended from the old-fashioned practical coat in which a man rode and worked. Or again, if one looks in modern English life for proof of the Norman Conquest eight centuries ago, one may find it in the “Oh yes! Oh yes!” of the town-crier, who all unknowingly keeps up the old French form of proclamation, “Oyez! Oyez!” that is, “Hear ye! Hear ye!” To what yet more distant periods of civilization such survivals may reach back, is well seen in an example from India. There, though people have for ages kindled fire for practical use with the flint and steel, yet the Brahmans, to make the sacred fire for the daily sacrifice, still use the barbaric art of violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood till a spark comes. Asked why they thus waste their labour when they know better, they answer that they do it to get pure and holy fire. But to us it is plain that they are really keeping up by unchanging custom a remnant of the ruder life once led by their remote ancestors. On the whole, these various ways of examining arts and sciences all prove that they never spring forth perfect, like Athene out of the split head of Zeus. They come on by successive steps, and where other information fails, the observer may often trust himself to judge from the mere look of an invention how it probably arose. Thus no one can look at a cross-bow and a common long-bow without being convinced that the long-bow was the earlier, and that the cross-bow was made afterwards by fitting a common bow on a stock, and arranging a trigger to let go the string after taking aim. Though history fails to tell us who did this and when, we feel almost as sure of it as of the known historical facts that the cross-bow led up to the match-lock, and that again to the flint-lock musket, and that again to the percussion musket, and that again to the breech-loading rifle.

Putting these various means of information together, it often becomes possible to picture the whole course of an art or an institution, tracing it back from its highest state in the civilized world till we reach its beginnings in the life of the rudest tribes of men. For instance, let us look at a course of modern mathematics, as represented in the books taken in for university honours. A student living in Queen Elizabeth’s time would have had no infinitesimal calculus to study, hardly even algebraic geometry, for what is now called the higher mathematics was invented since then. Going back into the Middle Ages, we come to the time when algebra had been just brought in, a novelty due to the Hindu mathematicians and their scholars, the Arabs; and next we find the numeral ciphers, 0, 1, 2, 3, &c., beginning to be known as an improvement on the old calculating board and the Roman I., II., III. In the classic ages yet earlier, we reach the time when the methods of Euklid and the other Greek geometers first appeared. So we get back to what was known to the mathematicians of the earliest historical period in Babylonia and Egypt, an arithmetic clumsily doing what children in the lower standards are taught with us to do far more neatly, and a rough geometry consisting of a few rules of practical mensuration. This is as far as history can go toward the beginnings of mathematics, but there are other means of discovering through what lower stages the science arose. The very names still used to denote lengths, such as cubit, hand, foot, span, nail, show how the art of mensuration had its origin in times when standard measures had not yet been invented, but men put their hands and feet alongside objects of which they wished to estimate the size. So there is abundant evidence that arithmetic came up from counting on the fingers and toes, such as may still be seen among savages. Words still used for numbers in many languages were evidently made during the period when such reckoning on the hands and feet was usual, and they have lasted on ever since. Thus a Malay expresses five by the word lima, which (though he does not know it) once meant “hand,” so that it is seen to be a survival from ages when his ancestors, wanting a word for five, held up one hand and said “hand.” Indeed, the reason of our own decimal notation, why we reckon by tens instead of the more convenient twelves, appears to be that our forefathers got from their own fingers the habit of counting by tens which has been since kept up, an unchanged relic of primitive man. The following chapters contain many other cases of such growth of arts from the simplest origins. Thus, in examining tools, it will be seen how the rudely chipped stone grasped in the hand to hack with, led up to the more artificially shaped stone chisel fitted as a hatchet in a wooden handle, how afterwards when metal came in there was substituted for the stone a bronze or iron blade, till at last was reached the most perfect modern foresters’ axe, with its steel blade socketed to take the well-balanced handle. Specimens such as those in Chapter VIII. show these great moves in the development of the axe, which began before chronology and history, and has been from the first one of man’s chief aids in civilizing himself.

It does not follow from such arguments as these that civilization is always on the move, or that its movement is always progress. On the contrary, history teaches that it remains stationary for long periods, and often falls back. To understand such decline of culture, it must be borne in mind that the highest arts and the most elaborate arrangements of society do not always prevail, in fact they may be too perfect to hold their ground, for people must have what fits with their circumstances. There is an instructive lesson to be learnt from a remark made by an Englishman at Singapore, who noticed with surprise two curious trades flourishing there. One was to buy old English-built ships, cut them down and rig them as junks; the other was to buy English percussion muskets and turn them into old-fashioned flintlocks. At first sight this looks like mere stupidity, but on consideration it is seen to be reasonable enough. It was so difficult to get Eastern sailors to work ships of European rig, that it answered better to provide them with the clumsier craft they were used to; and as for the guns, the hunters far away in the hot, damp forests were better off with gunflints than if they had to carry and keep dry a stock of caps. In both cases, what they wanted was not the highest product of civilization, but something suited to the situation and easiest to be had. Now the same rule applies both to taking in new civilization and keeping up old. When the life of a people is altered by emigration into a new country, or by war and distress at home, or mixture with a lower race, the culture of their forefathers may be no longer needed or possible, and so dwindles away. Such degeneration is to be seen among the descendants of Portuguese in the East Indies, who have intermarried with the natives and fallen out of the march of civilization, so that newly-arrived Europeans go to look at them lounging about their mean hovels in the midst of luxuriant tropical fruits and flowers, as if they had been set there to teach by example how man falls in culture where the need of effort is wanting. Another frequent cause of loss of civilization is when people once more prosperous are ruined or driven from their homes, like those Shoshonee Indians who have taken refuge from their enemies, the Blackfeet, in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, where they now roam, called Digger Indians from the wild roots they dig for as part of their miserable subsistence. Not only the degraded state of such outcasts, but the loss of particular arts by other peoples, may often be explained by loss of culture under unfavourable conditions. For instance, the South Sea Islanders, though not a very rude people when visited by Captain Cook, used only stone hatchets and knives, being indeed so ignorant of metal that they planted the first iron nails they got from the English sailors, in the hope of raising a new crop. Possibly their ancestors never had metals, but it seems as likely that these ancestors were an Asiatic people to whom metal was known, but who, through emigration to ocean islands and separation from their kinsfolk, lost the use of it and fell back into the stone age. It is necessary for the student to be alive to the importance of decline in civilization, but it is here more particularly mentioned in order to point out that it in no way contradicts the theory that civilization itself is developed from low to high stages. One cannot lose a thing without having had it first, and wherever tribes are fallen from the higher civilization of their ancestors, this only leaves it to be accounted for how that higher civilization grew up.

On the whole it appears that wherever there are found elaborate arts, abstruse knowledge, complex institutions, these are results of gradual development from an earlier, simpler, and ruder state of life. No stage of civilization comes into existence spontaneously, but grows or is developed out of the stage before it. This is the great principle which every scholar must lay firm hold of, if he intends to understand either the world he lives in or the history of the past. Let us now see how this bears on the antiquity and early condition of mankind. The monuments of Egypt and Babylonia show that toward 5,000 years ago certain nations had already come to an advanced state of culture. No doubt the greater part of the earth was then peopled by barbarians and savages, as it remained afterwards. But in the regions of the Nile and the Euphrates there was civilization. The ancient Egyptians had that greatest mark of a civilized nation, the art of writing; indeed the hieroglyphic characters of their inscriptions appear to have been the origin of our alphabet. They were a nation skilled in agriculture, raising from their fields fertilized by the yearly inundation those rich crops of grain that provided subsistence for the dense population. How numerous and how skilled in constructive art the ancient Egyptians were, is seen by every traveller who looks on the pyramids which have made their name famous through all history. The great pyramid of Gizeh still ranks among the wonders of the world, a mountain of hewn limestone and syenite, whose size Londoners describe by saying that it stands on a square the size of Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, and rises above the height of St. Paul’s. The perfection of its huge blocks and the beautiful masonry of the inner chambers and passages show the skill not only of the stonecutter but of the practical geometer. The setting of the sides to the cardinal points is so exact as to prove that the Egyptians were excellent observers of the elementary facts of astronomy; the day of the equinox can be taken by observing the sunset across the face of the pyramid, and the neighbouring Arabs still adjust their astronomical dates by its shadow. As far back as anything is known of them, the Egyptians appear to have worked in bronze and iron, as well as gold and silver. So their arts and habits, their sculpture and carpentry, their reckoning and measuring, their system of official life with its governors and scribes, their religion with its orders of priesthood and its continual ceremonies, all appear the results of long and gradual growth. What, perhaps, gives the highest idea of antiquity, is to look at very early monuments, such as the tomb of prince Teta of the 4th dynasty in the British Museum, and notice how Egyptian culture had even then begun to grow stiff and traditional. Art was already reaching the stage when it seemed to men that no more progress was possible, for their ancestors had laid down the perfect rule of life, which it was sin to alter by way of reform. Of the early Babylonians or Chaldæans less is known, yet their monuments and inscriptions show how ancient and how high was their civilization. Their writing was in cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters, of which they seem to have been the inventors, and which their successors, the Assyrians, learnt from them. They were great builders of cities, and the bricks inscribed with their kings’ names remain as records of their great temples, such, for instance, as that dedicated to the god of Ur, at the city known to Biblical history as Ur of the Chaldees. Written copies of their laws exist, so advanced as to have provisions as to the property of married women, the imprisonment of a father or mother for denying their son, the daily fine of a half-measure of corn levied on the master who killed or ill-used his slaves. Their astrology, which made the names of Chaldæan and Babylonian famous ever since, led them to make those regular observations of the heavenly bodies which gave rise to the science of astronomy. The nation which wrote its name thus largely in the book of civilization, dates back into the same period of high antiquity as the Egyptian. These then are the two nations whose culture is earliest vouched for by inscriptions done at the very time of their ancient grandeur, and therefore it is safer to appeal to them than to other nations which can only show as proofs of their antiquity writings drawn up in far later ages. Looking at their ancient civilization, it seems to have been formed by men whose minds worked much like our own. No super-human powers were required for the work, but just human nature groping on by roundabout ways, reaching great results, yet not half knowing how to profit by them when reached; solving the great problem of writing, yet not seeing how to simplify the clumsy hieroglyphics into letters; devoting earnest thought to religion and yet keeping up a dog and cat worship which was a jest even to the ancients; cultivating astronomy and yet remaining mazed in the follies of astrology. In the midst of their most striking efforts of civilization, the traces may be discerned of the barbaric condition which prevailed before; the Egyptian pyramids are burial-mounds like those of præhistoric England, but huge in size and built of hewn stone or brick; the Egyptian hieroglyphics, with their pictures of men and beasts and miscellaneous things, tell the story of their own invention, how they began as a mere picture-writing like that of the rude hunters of America. Thus it appears that civilization, at the earliest dates where history brings it into view, had already reached a level which can only be accounted for by growth during a long præhistoric period. This result agrees with the conclusions already arrived at by the study of races and language.

Without attempting here to draw a picture of life as it may have been among men at their first appearance on the earth, it is important to go back as far as such evidence of the progress of civilization may fairly lead us. In judging how mankind may have once lived, it is also a great help to observe how they are actually found living. Human life may be roughly classed into three great stages, Savage, Barbaric, Civilized, which may be defined as follows. The lowest or savage state is that in which man subsists on wild plants and animals, neither tilling the soil nor domesticating creatures for his food. Savages may dwell in tropical forests where the abundant fruit and game may allow small clans to live in one spot and find a living all the year round, while in barer and colder regions they have to lead a wandering life in quest of the wild food which they soon exhaust in any place. In making their rude implements, the materials used by savages are what they find ready to hand, such as wood, stone, and bone, but they cannot extract metal from the ore, and therefore belong to the Stone Age. Men may be considered to have risen into the next or barbaric state when they take to agriculture. With the certain supply of food which can be stored till next harvest, settled village and town life is established, with immense results in the improvement of arts, knowledge, manners, and government. Pastoral tribes are to be reckoned in the barbaric stage, for though their life of shifting camp from pasture to pasture may prevent settled habitation and agriculture, they have from their herds a constant supply of milk and meat. Some barbaric nations have not come beyond using stone implements, but most have risen into the Metal Age. Lastly, civilized life may be taken as beginning with the art of writing, which by recording history, law, knowledge, and religion for the service of ages to come, binds together the past and the future in an unbroken chain of intellectual and moral progress. This classification of three great stages of culture is practically convenient, and has the advantage of not describing imaginary states of society, but such as are actually known to exist. So far as the evidence goes, it seems that civilization has actually grown up in the world through these three stages, so that to look at a savage of the Brazilian forests, a barbarous New Zealander or Dahoman, and a civilized European, may be the student’s best guide to understanding the progress of civilization, only he must be cautioned that the comparison is but a guide, not a full explanation.

In this way it is reasonably inferred that even in countries now civilized, savage and low barbaric tribes must have once lived. Fortunately it is not left altogether to the imagination to picture the lives of these rude and ancient men, for many relics of them are found which may be seen and handled in museums. It has now to be considered what sort of evidence of man’s age is thus to be had from archæology and geology, and what it proves.

When an antiquary examines the objects dug up in any place, he can generally judge in what state of civilization its inhabitants have been. Thus if there are found weapons of bronze or iron, bits of fine pottery, bones of domestic cattle, charred corn and scraps of cloth, this would be proof that people lived there in a civilized, or at least a high barbaric condition. If there are only rude implements of stone and bone, but no metal, no earthenware, no remains to show that the land was tilled or cattle kept, this would be evidence that the country had been inhabited by some savage tribe. One of the chief questions to be asked about the condition of any people is, whether they have metal in use for their tools and weapons. If so, they may be said to be in the metal age. If they have no copper or iron, but make their hatchets, knives, spear-heads, and other cutting and piercing instruments of stone, they are said to be in the stone age. Wherever such stone implements are picked up, as they often are in our own ploughed fields, they prove that stone-age men have once dwelt in the land. It is an important fact that in every region of the inhabited world ancient stone implements are thus found in the ground, showing that at some time the inhabitants were in this respect like the modern savages. In countries where the people have long been metal-workers, they have often lost all memory of what these stone things are, and tell fanciful stories to account for their being met with in ploughing or digging. One favourite notion, in England and elsewhere, is that the stone hatchets are “thunderbolts” fallen from the sky with the lightning flash. It has been imagined that in the East, the seat of the most ancient civilizations, some district might be found without any traces of man having lived there in a state of early rudeness, so that in this part of the world he might have been civilized from the first. But it is not so. In Assyria, Palestine, Egypt, as in other lands, one may find sharp-chipped flints which show that here also tribes in the stone age once lived, before the use of metal brought in higher civilization.

Fig. 1.—Later Stone Age (neolithic) implements. a, stone celt or hatchet; b, flint spear-head; c, scraper; d, arrow-heads; e, flint flake-knives; f, core from which flint-flakes taken off; g, flint-awl; h, flint saw; i, stone hammer-head.

Whether it may be considered or not that Europe was a quarter of the globe inhabited by the earliest tribes of men, it so happens that remains found in Europe furnish at present the best proofs of man’s antiquity. To understand these, it must be explained that the stone age had an earlier and a later period, as may be plainly seen in looking at a good collection of stone implements. [Fig. 1] is intended to give some idea of those in use in the later stone age. The hatchet is neatly shaped and edged by rubbing on a grinding-stone, as is also the hammer-head. The spear and arrows, scraper, and flake-knife it would have been waste of labour to grind, but they are chipped out with much skill. On the whole, these stone implements are much like those which the North American Indians have been using to our own day. The question is, how long ago tribes who made such stone implements were living in Europe. As to this, we may fairly judge from the position in which they are found in Denmark. The forests of that country are mainly of beeches, but in the peat-mosses lie innumerable trunks of oaks, which show that at an earlier period oak-forests prevailed, and deeper still there lie trunks of pine trees, which show that there were pine-forests still older than the oak-forests. Thus there have been three successive forest-periods, the beech, the oak, and the pine, and the depth of the peat-mosses, which in places is as much as thirty feet, shows that the period of the pine trees was thousands of years ago. While the forests have been changing, the condition of the people living among them has changed also. The modern woodman cuts down the beech-trees with his iron axe, but among the oak-trunks in the peat are found bronze swords and shield-bosses, which show that the inhabitants of the country were then in the bronze age, and lastly, a flint hatchet taken out from where it lay still lower in the peat beneath the pine-trunks, proves that stone-age men in Denmark lived in the pine-forest period, which carries them back to high antiquity. In England, the tribes who have left such stone implements were in the land before the invasion of that Keltic race whom we call the ancient Britons, and who no doubt came armed with weapons of metal. The stone hatchet-blades and arrow-heads of the older population lie scattered over our country, hill and dale, moor and fen, near the surface of the ground, or deeper underground in peat-mosses, or beds of mud and silt. Such bogs or mud-flats began at a date which chronologists would call ancient. But they are what geologists, accustomed to vaster periods of time, consider modern. They belong to the newer alluvial deposits, that is, they were formed within the times when the lie of the land and the flow of the streams were much as they are now. To get an idea of this, one has only to look down from a hill-side into a wide valley below, and notice how its flat flooring of mud and sand, stretching right across, must have been laid down by flood-waters following very much their present course along the main stream and down the side slopes. The people of the newer stone age, whose implements are seen in [Fig. 1], lived within this historically ancient, but geologically modern period, and relics of them are found only in places where man or nature could then have placed them.

Fig. 2.—Earlier Stone Age (palæolithic) flint picks or hatchets.

But there had been a still earlier period of the stone age, when yet ruder tribes of men lived in our parts of the world, when the climate and the face of the country were strangely different from the present state of things. On the slopes of river valleys such as that of the Ouse, in England, and the Somme, in France, 50 or 100 feet above the present river-banks, and thus altogether out of the reach of any flood now, there are beds of so-called drift gravel. Out of these beds have been dug numerous rude implements of flint, chipped into shape by the hands of men who had gained no mean dexterity in the art, as any one will find who will try his hand at making one, with any tools he thinks fit. The most remarkable implements of this earlier stone age are the picks or hatchets shown in [Fig. 2]. The coarseness of their finish, and the absence of any signs of grinding even at the edges of hacking or cutting instruments, show that the makers had not come nearly to the skill of the later stone age. It is usual to distinguish the two kinds of implements, and the periods they belong to, by the terms introduced by Sir J. Lubbock, palæolithic and neolithic, that is “old-stone” and “new-stone.” Looking now at the high gravel-beds in which palæolithic implements such as those shown in [Fig. 2] occur, it is evident from their position that they had nothing to do with the water-action which is now laying down and shifting sand-banks and mud-flats at the bottom of the valleys, nor with the present rain-wash which scours the surface of the hill-sides. They must have been deposited in a former period when the condition of land and water was different from what it is now. How far this state of things was due to the valleys not being yet cut out to near their present depth, to the whole country lying lower above the sea-level, or to the rivers being vastly larger than at present from the heavier rainfall of a pluvial period, it would be raising too intricate geological questions to discuss here. Geology shows the old drift-gravels to belong to times when the glacial or icy period with its arctic climate was passing, or had passed away, in Europe. From the bones and teeth found with the flint implements in the gravel-beds, it is known what animals inhabited the land at the same time with the men of the old stone age. The mammoth, or huge woolly elephant, and several kinds of rhinoceros, also extinct, browsed on the branches of the forest trees, and a species of hippopotamus much like that at present living frequented the rivers. The musk-ox and the grizzly bear, which England harboured in this remote period, may still be hunted in the Rocky Mountains, but the ancient cave-bear, which was one of the dangerous wild beasts of our land, is no longer on the face of the earth. The British lion was of a larger breed than those now in Asia and Africa, and perhaps than those which Herodotus mentions as prowling in Macedonia in the fifth century B.C., and falling on the camels of Xerxes’ army. To judge by such signs as the presence of the reindeer, and the mammoth with its hairy coat, the climate of Europe was severer than now, perhaps like that of Siberia. How long man had been in the land there is no clear evidence. For all we know, he may have lasted on from an earlier and more genial period, or he may have only lately migrated into Europe from some warmer region. Implements like his are not unknown in Asia, as where in Southern India, above Madras, there lies at the foot of the Eastern Gháts a terrace of irony clay or laterite, containing stone implements of very similar make to those of the drift-men in Europe.

Fig. 3.—Sketch of mammoth from cave of La Madeleine (Lartet and Christy).

These European savages of the mammoth-period resorted much to shelter at the foot of overhanging cliffs, and to caverns such as Kent’s Hole near Torquay, where the implements of the men and the bones of the beasts are found together in abundance. In Central France especially, the examination of such bone-caves has brought to light evidence of the whole way of life of a group of ancient tribes. The reindeer which have now retreated to high northern latitudes, were then plentiful in France, as appears from their bones and antlers imbedded with remains of the mammoth under the stalagmite floors of the caves of Perigord. With them are found rude stone hatchets and scrapers, pounding-stones, bone spear-heads, awls, arrow-straighteners, and other objects belonging to a life like that of the modern Esquimaux who hunt the reindeer on the coasts of Hudson’s Bay. Like the Esquimaux also, these early French and Swiss savages spent their leisure time in carving figures of animals. Among many such figures found in the French caves is a mammoth, [Fig. 3], scratched on a piece of its own ivory, so as to touch off neatly the shaggy hair and huge curved tusks which distinguish the mammoth from other species of elephant. There has been also found a rude representation of a man, [Fig. 4], grouped with two horses’ heads and a snake or eel; this is interesting as being the most ancient human portrait known.

Fig. 4.—Sketch of man and horses from cave (Lartet and Christy).

Thus it appears that man of the older stone age was already living when the floods went as high above our present valley-flats as the tops of the high trees growing there now reach, and when the climate was of that Lapland kind suited to the woolly mammoth and the reindeer, and the rest of the un-English looking group of animals now perished out of this region, or extinct altogether. From all that is known of the slowness with which such alterations take place anywhere in the lie of the land, the climate, and the wild animals, we cannot suppose changes so vast to have happened without a long lapse of time before the newer stone age came in, when the streams had settled down to near their present levels, and the climate and the wild creatures had become much as they were within the historical period. It is also plain from the actual remains found, that these most ancient known tribes were wild hunters and fishers, such as we should now class as savages. It is best, however, not to apply to them the term primitive men, as this might be understood to mean that they were the first men who appeared on earth, or at least like them. The life the men of the mammoth-period must have led at Abbeville or Torquay, shows on the face of it reasons against its being man’s primitive life. These old stone-age men are more likely to have been tribes whose ancestors while living under a milder climate gained some rude skill in the arts of procuring food and defending themselves, so that afterwards they were able by a hard struggle to hold their own against the harsh weather and fierce beasts of the quaternary period.

How long ago this period was, no certain knowledge is yet to be had. Some geologists have suggested twenty thousand years, while others say a hundred thousand or more, but these are guesses made where there is no scale to reckon time by. It is safest to be content at present to regard it as a geological period lying back out of the range of chronology. It is thought by several eminent geologists that stones shaped by man, and therefore proving his presence, occur in England and France in beds deposited before the last glacial period, when much of the continent lay submerged under an icy sea, where drifting icebergs dropped on what is now dry land their huge boulders of rock transported from distant mountains. This cannot be taken as proved, but if true it would immensely increase our estimate of man’s age. At any rate the conclusive proofs of man’s existence during the quaternary or mammoth period do not even bring us into view of the remoter time when human life first began on earth. Thus geology establishes a principle which lies at the very foundation of the science of anthropology. Until of late, while it used to be reckoned by chronologists that the earth and man were less than 6,000 years old, the science of geology could hardly exist, there being no room for its long processes of building up the strata containing the remains of its vast successions of plants and animals. These are now accounted for on the theory that geological time extends over millions of years. It is true that man reaches back comparatively little way into this immense lapse of time. Yet his first appearance on earth goes back to an age compared with which the ancients, as we call them, are but moderns. The few thousand years of recorded history only take us back to a præhistoric period of untold length, during which took place the primary distribution of mankind over the earth and the development of the great races, the formation of speech and the settlement of the great families of language, and the growth of culture up to the levels of the old world nations of the East, the forerunners and founders of modern civilized life.

Having now sketched what history, archæology, and geology teach as to man’s age and course on the earth, we shall proceed in the following chapters to describe more fully Man and his varieties as they appear in natural history, next examining the nature and growth of Language, and afterwards the development of the knowledge, arts, and institutions, which make up Civilization.

CHAPTER II.
MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS.

Vertebrate Animals, [35]—Succession and Descent of Species, [37]—Apes and Man, comparison of structure, [38]—Hands and Feet, [42]—Hair, [44]—Features, [44]—Brain, [45]—Mind in Lower Animals and Man, [47].

To understand rightly the construction of the human body, and to compare our own limbs and organs with those of other animals, requires a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physiology. It will not be attempted here to draw up an abstract of these sciences, for which such handbooks should be studied as Huxley’s Elementary Physiology and Mivart’s Elementary Anatomy. But it will be useful to give a slight outline of the evidence as to man’s place in the animal world, which may be done without requiring special knowledge in the reader.

That the bodies of other animals more or less correspond in structure to our own is one of the lessons we begin to learn in the nursery. Boys playing at horses, one on all-fours and the other astride on his back, have already some notion how the imagined horse matches a real one as to head, eyes, and ears, mouth and teeth, back and legs. If one questions a country lad sitting on a stile watching the hunters go by, he knows well enough that the huntsman and his horse, the hounds and the hare they are chasing, are all creatures built up on the same kind of bony scaffolding or skeleton, that their life is carried on by means of similar organs, lungs to breathe with, a stomach to digest the food taken in by the mouth and gullet, a heart to drive the blood through the vessels, while the eyes, ears, and nostrils receive in them all in like manner the impressions of sight, hearing, and smell. Very likely the peasant has taken all this as a matter of course without ever reflecting on it, and even more educated people are apt to do the same. Had it come as a new discovery, it would have set any intelligent mind thinking what must be the tie or connexion between creatures thus formed as it were on one original pattern, only varied in different modes for different ends. The scientific comparison of animals, even when made in the most elementary way, does at once bring this great problem before our minds. In some cases, more exact knowledge shows that the first rough comparison of man and beast may want correction. For instance, when a man’s skeleton and a horse’s are set side by side, it becomes plain that the horse’s knee and hock do not answer, as is popularly supposed, to our elbow and knee, but to our wrist and ankle. The examination of the man’s limb and the horse’s leads to a further and remarkable conclusion, that the horse’s fore- and hind-leg really correspond to a man’s arm and leg in which all the fingers and toes should have become useless and shrunk away, except one finger and one toe, which are left to be walked upon, with the nail become a hoof. The general law to be learnt from the series of skeletons in a natural history museum, is that through order after order of fishes, reptiles, birds, beasts, up to man himself, a common type or pattern may be traced, belonging to all animals which are vertebrate, that is, which have a backbone. Limbs may still be recognised though their shape and service have changed, and though they may even have dwindled into remnants, as if left not for use, but to keep up the old model. Thus, although a perch’s skeleton differs so much from a man’s, its pectoral and ventral fins still correspond to arms and legs. Snakes are mostly limbless, yet there are forms which connect them with the quadrupeds, as for instance, the boa-constrictor’s skeleton shows a pair of rudimentary hind-legs. The Greenland whale has no visible hind-limbs, and its fore-limbs are paddles or flippers, yet when dissected, the skeleton shows not only remnants of what in man would be the leg-bones, but the flipper actually has within it the set of bones which belong to the human arm and hand. It is popularly considered that man is especially distinguished from the lower animals by not having a tail; yet the tail is plainly to be seen in the human skeleton, represented by the last tapering vertebræ of the spine.

All these are animals now living. But geology shows that in long-past ages the earth has been inhabited by species different from those at present existing, and yet evidently related to them. In the tertiary period, Australia was distinguished as now by its marsupial or pouched animals, but these were not of any present species, and mostly far larger; even the tallest kangaroo now to be seen is a puny creature in comparison with the enormous extinct diprotodon, whose skull was three feet long. So in South America there lived huge edentate animals, now poorly represented by the sloths, anteaters and armadillos, to be seen in our Zoological Gardens. Elephants are found fossil in the miocene deposits, but the species were all different from those in Africa and India now. These are common examples of the great principle now received by all zoologists, that from remote geological antiquity there have from time to time appeared on earth new species of animals, so far similar to those which came before them as to look as if the old types had been altered to fit new conditions of life, the earlier forms then tending to die out and disappear. This relation between the older species of vertebrate animals and the newer species which have supplanted them, is a matter of actual observation, and beyond dispute. Many zoologists, now perhaps the majority, go a step farther than this, not only acknowledging that there is a relation between the new species and the old, but seeking to explain it by the hypothesis of descent or development, now often called, from its great modern expounder, the Darwinian theory. The formation of breeds or varieties of animals being an admitted fact, it is argued that natural variation under changed conditions of life can go far enough to produce new species, which by better adaptation to climate and circumstances may supplant the old. On this theory, the present kangaroos of Australia, sloths of South America, and elephants of India, are not only the successors but the actual descendants of extinct ones, and the fossil bones of tertiary horse-like animals with three-toed and four-toed feet show what the remote ancestors of our horses were like, in ages before the unused toes dwindled to the splint-bones which represent them in the horse’s leg now. According to the doctrine of descent, when several species of animals living at the same time show close resemblance in structure, it is inferred that this resemblance must have been inherited by all from one ancestral species. Now of all the mammalia, or animals which suckle their young, those whose structure brings them closest to man are the apes or monkeys, and among these the catarhine or near-nostrilled apes of the Old World, and among these the group called anthropoid or manlike, which inhabit tropical forests from Africa to the Eastern Archipelago. By now comparing their skeletons, it will be seen that in any scale of nature or scheme of creation these animals must be placed in somewhat close relation to man. No competent anatomist who has examined the bodily structure of these apes considers it possible that man can be descended from any of them, but according to the doctrine of descent they appear as the nearest existing offshoots from the same primitive stock whence man also came.

Fig. 5.—Skeletons of apes and man. a, gibbon; b, orang; c, chimpanzee; d, gorilla; e, man (after Huxley).

Professor Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, in which this anatomical comparison is made, contains a celebrated drawing which is copied in [Fig. 5] as the readiest means of showing how the anthropoid apes correspond bone for bone with ourselves. At the same time it illustrates some main points in which their bodily actions are unlike ours. It has been said that the child first takes on him the dignity of man when he leaves off going on all-fours. But in fact, standing and walking upright is not a mere matter of training; it belongs to the arrangement of the human body being different from that of quadrupeds. The limbs of the dog or cow are so proportioned as to bring them down on all-fours, and this is to a less degree the case with the apes, while the head and trunk of the growing child are lifted toward the erect attitude by the disproportionate growth of the lower limbs. Though man’s standing upright requires continued muscular effort, he is so built as to keep his balance more readily than other animals in this position. It may be noticed from the figure how in man the opening at the base of the skull (occipital foramen) through which the spinal cord passes up into the brain, is farther to the front than in the apes, so that his skull, instead of pitching forward, is balanced on the top of the atlas vertebra (so called from Atlas supporting the globe). The figure shows also the S-like curvature of man’s spine, and how the bony pelvis or basin forms a broad support for his intestines as he stands upright, in which attitude the feet serve as bases enabling the legs to carry the trunk. Thus the erect posture, only imitated with difficult effort by the showman’s performing animals, is to man easy and unconstrained. Not through great differences of structure, but by adjustments of bones and muscles, the fore- and hind-limbs of quadrupeds work in accord, while in man, whose muscular adaptation is for going on his legs, there is no such reciprocal action between the legs and arms. Of the monkey tribes, many walk fairly on all-fours as quadrupeds, with legs bent, arms straightened forward, soles and palms touching the ground. But the higher manlike apes are adapted by their structure for a climbing life among the trees, whose branches they grasp with feet and hands. When the orang-utan takes to the ground he shambles clumsily along, generally putting down the outer edge of the feet and the bent knuckles of the hands. The orang and gorilla have the curious habit of resting on their bent fists, so as to draw their bodies forward between their long arms, like a cripple between his crutches. The nearest approach that apes naturally make to the erect attitude, is where the gibbon will go along on its feet, touching the ground with its knuckles first on one side and then on the other, or will run some distance with its arms thrown back above its head to keep the balance, or when the gorilla will rise on its legs and rush forward to attack. All these modes of locomotion may be understood from the skeletons in the figure. The apes thus present interesting intermediate stages between quadruped and biped. But only man is so formed that, using his feet to carry him, he has his hands free for their special work.

Fig. 6.—a, hand, b, foot, of chimpanzee (after Vogt); c, hand, d, foot, of man.

In comparing man with the lower animals, it is wrong to set down his pre-eminence entirely to his mind, without noticing the superiority of his limbs as instruments for practical arts. If one looks at the illustrations to “Reynard the Fox,” where the artist does his best to represent the lion holding a sceptre, the she-wolf flirting a fan, or the fox writing a letter; what he really shows is, how ill adapted the limbs of quadrupeds are to such actions. Man’s being the “tool-using animal” is due to his having hands to use the tool as well as mind to invent it; and only the apes, as most nearly approaching man in their limbs, can fairly imitate the use of such instruments as a spoon or a knife. In [Fig. 6] the hand and foot of the chimpanzee may be compared with those of man. Here the ape’s foot b, looks so like a hand, that many naturalists have classed the higher apes under the name of four-handed animals, or quadrumana. In anatomical structure it is a foot, but it is a prehensile or grasping foot, able to clip or pinch an object by setting the great toe thumb-wise against the others, which the human foot d, cannot do. It is true that among people who go barefoot the great toe is not quite so helpless as that of a boot-wearing European. With the naked foot the savage Australian picks up his spear, and the Hindu tailor holds his cloth as he squats sewing. The above drawing is purposely taken, not from the free foot of the savage, but from the European foot cramped by the stiff leather boot, because this shows in the utmost way the contrast between ape and man. In the ape, it is seen that both the hands and feet gain their suitability for a tree-climbing life at the loss of their suitability for walking on the ground. But man’s upper and lower extremities have become differentiated or specialised in two opposite ways, the human foot becoming a stepping-machine with less grasping-power than the ape-foot, while the human hand comes to excel the ape-hand as a special organ for feeling, holding, and handling. The figure c shows the longer and freely-acting thumb and the wider flexible palm in man, the sensitive cushions at our finger-ends also giving us greater delicacy of touch. It is most instructive to visit the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens for the purpose of comparing hands of high and low kinds. The hand of the marmoset with its five claw-nailed digits, is a mere grasping instrument hardly capable of handling. Other low monkeys have the thumbs small and not opposable, that is, their ends do not meet those of the other fingers, whereas the thumbs of the higher apes are (as the figure shows) opposable like ours. How far the value of the hand as a mechanical instrument depends on this opposability, any one may satisfy himself by using his hand with the thumb stiff. It is plain that man’s hand, enabling him to shape and wield weapons and tools to subdue nature to his own ends, is one cause of his standing first among animals. It is not so obvious, but it is true, that his intellectual development must have been in no small degree gained by the use of his hands. From handling objects, putting them in different positions, and setting them side by side, he was led to those simplest kinds of comparing and measuring which are the first elements of exact knowledge, or science.

Outwardly, the shaggy hair of the apes contrasts with the comparative nakedness of the human skin. In man as in lower animals, the thatch of hair indeed forms an effective shelter to the head. The hairy fringe round the human mouth in the adult male has in some races a strong growth, as in the European or the native of Australia. But in others, as the African negro and the so-called American Indian, the scanty face-hair looks as though it had dwindled to the mere remnant of a fuller growth. Looked at in this way, the hairy patches on the Englishman’s breast and limbs, though practically of no importance, are an object of curious interest to the naturalists who consider them relics from the remote period when man’s ancestral stock had a fuller hairy covering, whose want is now supplied by artificial shelter suited to season and climate. It is interesting to notice that there are some few human beings to be met with, whose faces and bodies are largely covered with long shaggy hair. Such a face-covering hides the play of feature—that expressive means of intercourse between mind and mind. Had the skeletons of apes and man in our figure been clothed with flesh, we should have seen plainly the signs of man’s higher organisation in the flexible versatile features, in whose movements and folds are symbolised the pleasures and pains, the loves and hates, of every phase of human life. How coarse and clumsy are the corresponding changes of face in the monkey-tribes, such as the drawing back of the corners of the mouth and wrinkling of the lower eyelid which constitute an ape’s smile, or the rise and fall of the baboon’s eyebrow’s and forehead in anger. The visitor from some other planet, so often imagined as coming to our earth and forming his judgments by what he sees, might well discern in the difference between man’s face and the gorilla’s muzzle some measure of the discrepancy within.

The brain being the instrument or organ of mind, anatomists comparing the brains of animals have looked for well-marked distinctions between the less and the more intelligent. In the natural order of Primates, to which man belongs with the monkeys and lemurs, the series of brains shows a remarkable rise or development from lower to higher forms. The lemur has a small and comparatively smooth brain, whereas the high anthropoid apes have brains which strikingly approach man’s. In fact the lemur has very little mind in comparison with the sagacious and teachable chimpanzee or orang-utan. But man’s reason so vastly surpasses that of the highest apes, that naturalists have wondered at the likeness of their brain to ours, which is illustrated in the accompanying [Fig. 7], representing the brain of the chimpanzee a, and of man b, whole on the left to show the convolutions, and cut across on the right to expose the interior. To compare their structure the two brains are drawn of the same size, but in fact the chimpanzee brain is much smaller than the human. It is one great difference between man and the anthropoid apes, that his brain exceeds theirs in quantity; in a rough way he has three pounds of brain to their one. It is seen also that in the ape-brain the lobes or hemispheres have fewer and simpler windings than the more complex convolutions of the human brain, which in general outline they resemble. Now both size and complexity mean mind-power. The lobes of the brain consist within of the “white matter” with its innumerable fibres carrying nerve-currents, while the outer coating is formed of the “grey matter,” containing the brain-corpuscles or cells from which the fibres issue, and which are centres through which the combinations are made which we are conscious of as thoughts. As the coating of grey matter follows the foldings of the brain down into the fissures, it is evident that the increased complexity of the convolutions, combined with greater actual size of brain, furnishes man with a vastly more extensive and intricate thinking-apparatus than the animals nearest below him in the order of nature.

Fig. 7.—Brain of chimpanzee (a) and of man (b), seen from above, showing the cerebral hemispheres, whole on left, in section on right (after Huxley).

Having looked at some of the important differences between the bodies of man and lower animals, we may venture to ask the still harder question, How far do their minds work like ours? No full answer can be given, yet there are some well ascertained points to judge by. To begin, it is clear that the simple processes of sense, will, and action, are carried on in man by the same bodily machinery as in other high vertebrate animals. How like their organs of sense are, is well illustrated by the anatomist who dissects a bullock’s eye as a substitute for a man’s, to show how the picture of the outer world is thrown by the lenses on the retina or screen, into which spread the end-fibres of the optic nerve leading into the brain. Not but what the touch, sight, and other senses in the various orders of animals have their special differences, as where the eagle’s eyes are focussed to see small objects far beyond man’s range, while the horse’s eyes are so set in his head that they do not converge like ours, and he must practically have two pictures of the two sides of the road to deal with. Such special differences, however, make the general resemblance all the more striking. Next, the nervous system in beast and man shows the same common plan, the brain and spinal cord forming a central nervous organ, to which the sensory nerves convey the messages of the senses, and from which the motor nerves carry the currents causing muscular contraction and movement. The involuntary acts of animals are like our own, as when the sleeping dog draws his leg back if it is touched, much as his master would do, and when awake, both man and beast wink when a finger pretends to strike at their eyes. If we go on to voluntary actions, done with conscious will and thought, the lower creatures can for some distance keep company with mankind. At the Zoological Gardens one may sometimes see a handful of nuts divided between the monkeys inside the bars and the children outside, and it is instructive to notice how nearly both go through the same set of movements, looking, approaching, elbowing, grasping, cracking, munching, swallowing, holding out their hands for more. Up to this level, the monkeys show all the mental likeness to man that their bodily likeness would lead us to expect. Now we know that in the scramble, there passes in the children’s minds a great deal besides the mere sight and feel of the nuts, and the will to take and eat them. Between the sensation and action there takes place thought. To describe it simply, the boy knows a nut by sight, wishes to renew the pleasant taste of former nuts, and directs his hands and mouth to grasp, crack, and eat. But here are complicated mental processes. Knowing a nut by sight, or having an idea of a nut, means that there are grouped together in the child’s mind memories of a number of past sensations, which have so become connected by experience that a particular form and colour, feel and weight, lead to the expectation of a particular flavour. Of what here takes place in the boy’s mind we can judge, though by no means clearly, from what we know about our own thoughts and what others have told us about theirs. What takes place in the monkeys’ minds we can only guess by watching their actions, but these are so like the human as to be most readily explained by considering their brain-work also to be like the human, though less clear and perfect. It seems as though a beast’s idea or thought of an object may be, as our own, a group of remembered sensations compacted into a whole. What makes this the more likely is that when part of the sensations present themselves, the animal seems to judge that the rest must be there also, much as we ourselves are so apt to do. Thus a dog will jump upon a scum-covered stream which it takes for dry land, or when offered a sham biscuit will come for it, turning away when smell and taste prove that the rest of the idea does not agree with what sight suggested.

In much the same way, all people who attend to the proceedings of animals, account for them by faculties more or less like their own. Not only do creatures of all high orders give unmistakable signs of pleasure and pain, but our dealings with the brutes go on the ground of their sharing with us such more complex emotions as fear, affection, anger, nay, even curiosity, jealousy, and revenge. Some of these show themselves in bodily symptoms which are quite human, as every one must admit who has felt the trembling limbs and throbbing heart of a frightened puppy, or looked at the picture in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions of the chimpanzee who has had his fruit taken from him, and displays his sulkiness by a pout which is a caricature of a child’s. Again, the lower animals show a well-marked will, which like man’s is not simply wish, but the resultant or balance of wishes, so that it is possible for two people calling a dog different ways, or both offering him bones, to distract his will in a way that reminds us of the philosopher’s imaginary ass that died of starvation between its hay and its water. As to the power of memory in brutes, we have all had opportunities of noticing how lasting and exact it is. Some things which the animals remember may be explained simply by their ideas becoming associated through habit, as when the horse betrays its former owner’s ways by stopping at every public-house; this may only mean that the familiar door suggests to the beast the memory of rest, and he stops. But to watch a dog dreaming makes us think that whole trains of ideas from the storehouse of memory are passing before his consciousness, as in our dreams. A memory in which such a revival of the past is possible, is a source of experience whence to extract understanding of the present, and foresight of the future. To make the memory of what has been, the means of controlling what shall be, is the great intellectual faculty in man, and in simple and elementary forms it comes into view among lower creatures. To tell but one of the innumerable animal stories which show expectation and design founded on experience. A certain Mr. Cops, who had a young orang-utan, one day gave it half an orange, put the other half away out of its sight on a high press, and lay down himself on the sofa, but the ape’s movements attracting his attention, he only pretended to go to sleep; the creature came cautiously and satisfied himself of his master being asleep, then climbed up the press, ate the rest of the orange, carefully hid the peel among some shavings in the grate, examined the pretended sleeper again, and then went to lie down on his own bed. Such behaviour is only to be explained by a train of thought involving something of what in ourselves we call reason.

To measure the differences between beast and man is really more difficult than tracing their resemblances. One plain mark of the higher intellectual rank of man is that he is less dependent on instinct than the animals which migrate at a fixed season, or build nests of a fixed and complicated pattern peculiar to their kind. Man has some instincts plainly agreeing with those of inferior animals, such as the child’s untaught movements to ward off danger, and the parental affection which preserves the offspring during the first defenceless period of life. But if man were possessed by a resistless longing to set off wandering southward before winter, or to build a shelter of boughs laid in a particular way, this would be less beneficial to his species than the use of intelligent judgment adapting his actions to climate, supply of food, danger from enemies, and a multitude of circumstances differing from district to district, and changing from year to year. If man’s remote progenitors had instincts like the beavers’ implanted in the very structure of their brain, these instincts have long ago fallen away, displaced by freer and higher reason. Man’s power of accommodating himself to the world he lives in, and even of controlling it, is largely due to his faculty of gaining new knowledge. Yet it must not be overlooked that this faculty is in a less measure possessed by other animals. We may catch them in the act of learning by experience, which is indeed one of the most curious sights in natural history, as when telegraph-wires are set up in a new district, and after the second year partridges no longer kill themselves by flying against them, or where in Canada the wily marten baffles the trapper’s ingenuity, finding out how to get the bait away, even from a new kind of trap, without letting it fall. The faculty of learning by imitation comes out in the apes in an almost human way. The anthropoid ape Mafuka, kept lately in the Zoological Gardens at Dresden, saw how the door of her cage was unlocked, and not only did it herself, but even stole the key and hid it under her arm for future use; after watching the carpenter she seized his bradawl and bored holes with it through the little table she had her meals on; at her meals she not only filled her own cup from the jug, but, what is more remarkable, she carefully stopped pouring before it ran over. The death of this ape had an almost human pathos; when her friend the director of the gardens came to her, she put her arms round his neck, kissed him three times, and then lay down on her bed and giving him her hand fell into her last sleep. One cannot but think that creatures so sagacious must learn in their wild state. Indeed less clever animals seem to some extent to teach their young, birds to sing, wolves to hunt, although it is most difficult for naturalists in such cases to judge what comes by instinct and what is consciously learnt.

Philosophers have tried to draw a hard and fast line between the animal and human mind. The most celebrated of these attempts is Locke’s, where in his Essay concerning Human Understanding he lays it down that beasts indeed have ideas, but are without man’s faculty of forming abstract or general ideas. Now it is true that we have learnt to reason with abstract ideas, such as solidity and fluidity, quantity and quality, vegetable and animal, courage and cowardice; and that there is not the least reason to suppose that such abstractions are formed by dogs or apes. But though the faculty of thus abstracting and generalising is one which rises to the highest flights of philosophic thought, it must be borne in mind that it begins in easy mental acts which seem quite possible to animals. Abstraction is noticing what several thoughts have in common, and neglecting their differences; thus a general idea is obtained by not attending too closely to particulars. The simplest form of this is when only one sense at a time is attended to, as in Locke’s example of the idea of whiteness, as being that which chalk, snow, and milk, agree in. But, to judge by animals’ actions, they also will attend to one sense at a time, as where a bull is excited by anything red. And it is most interesting to watch animals comparing a new object with their recollections or ideas of previous ones, practically recognising in it what is already familiar, and expecting it to behave like other individuals of its class. Cats or monkeys do not require to be shown the use of a fresh rug or cushion, when it is at all like the old one it is put in place of, and the “dog of the regiment” will accept any man in the uniform as a master, whether he has seen him before or not. Thus, the very simplicity of animal thought foreshadows the results of man’s higher abstraction and generalisation. Let us now read a few lines farther in Locke, and we shall see why he concludes that animals have not the power of forming abstract ideas. It is, he says, because they have no use of words or other general signs. But this itself is an easier point and far more worth arguing, than the hard question whether brutes have abstract ideas. In fact the power of speech gives about the clearest distinction that can be drawn between the action of mind in beast and man. It is far more satisfactory than another division attempted by philosophers who lay it down that while other animals have consciousness, man alone has self-consciousness, that is, he not only feels and thinks, but is aware of himself as feeling and thinking. Man, we know, is capable of this self-consciousness, which is cultivated by his being able to talk about himself as he does about other persons; but it has never been proved that animals, who we know are not apt to mistake their own bodies for anything outside, have no consciousness of themselves. When we study the rules of sign-making and language, we really have some means of contrasting the animals with ourselves. Evidently it is by means of language that the human mind has been able to work out and mark the high abstract ideas we deal with so easily; without words, how could we have reached results of combined and compared thought such as momentum, plurality, righteousness? The great mental gap between us and the animals we study is well measured by the difference between their feeble beginnings in calling one another and knowing when they are called, and man’s capacity for perfect speech. It is not merely that the highest anthropoid apes have no speech; they have not the brain-organisation enabling them to acquire even its rudiments. Man’s power of using a word, or even a gesture, as the symbol of a thought and the means of conversing about it, is one of the points where we most plainly see him parting company with all lower species, and starting on his career of conquest through higher intellectual regions.

In the comparison of man with other animals the standard should naturally be the lowest man, or savage. Put the savage is possessed of human reason and speech, while his brain-power, though it has not of itself raised him to civilization, enables him to receive more or less of the education which transforms him into a civilized man. To show how man may have advanced from savagery to civilization is a reasonable task, worked out to some extent in the later chapters of this volume. But there is no such evidence available for crossing the mental gulf that divides the lowest savage from the highest ape. On the whole, the safest conclusion warranted by facts is that the mental machinery of the lower animals is roughly similar to our own, up to a limit. Beyond this limit the human mind opens out into wide ranges of thought and feeling which the beast-mind shows no sign of approaching. If we consider man’s course of life from birth to death, we see that it is, so to speak, founded on functions which he has in common with lower beings. Man, endowed with instinct and capable of learning by experience, drawn by pleasure and driven by pain, must like a beast maintain his life by food and sleep, must save himself by flight, or fight it out with his foes, must propagate his species and care for the next generation. Upon this lower framework of animal life is raised the wondrous edifice of human language, science, art, and law.

CHAPTER III.
RACES OF MANKIND.

Differences of Race, [56]—Stature and Proportions, [56]—Skull, [60]—Features, [62]—Colour, [66]—Hair, [71]—Constitution, [73]—Temperature, [74]—Types of Races, [75]—Permanence, [80]—Mixture, [80]—Variation, [84]—Races of Mankind classified, [87].

In the first chapter something has been already said as to the striking distinctions between the various races of man, seen in looking closely at the African negro, the Coolie of India, and the Chinese. Even among Europeans, the broad contrast between the fair Dane and the dark Genoese is recognised by all. Some further comparison has now to be made of the special differences between race and race, though the reader must understand that, without proper anatomical examination, such comparison can only be slight and imperfect. Anthropology finds race-differences most clearly in stature and proportions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within, characters of features, skin, eyes, and hair, peculiarities of constitution, and mental and moral temperament.

In comparing races as to their stature, we concern ourselves not with the tallest or shortest men of each tribe, but with the ordinary or average-sized men who may be taken as fair representatives of their whole tribe. The difference of general stature is well shown where a tall and a short people come together in one district. Thus in Australia the average English colonist of 5 ft. 8 in. looks clear over the heads of the 5 ft. 4 in. Chinese labourers. Still more in Sweden does the Swede of 5 ft. 7 in. tower over the stunted Lapps, whose average measure is not much over 5 ft. Among the tallest of mankind are the Patagonians, who seemed a race of giants to the Europeans who first watched them striding along their cliffs draped in their skin cloaks; it was even declared that the heads of Magalhaens’ men hardly reached the waist of the first Patagonian they met. Modern travellers find, on measuring them, that they really often reach 6 ft. 4 in., their mean height being about 5 ft. 11 in.—three or four inches taller than average Englishmen. The shortest of mankind are the Bushmen and related tribes in South Africa, with an average height not far exceeding 4 ft. 6 in. A fair contrast between the tallest and shortest races of mankind may be seen in [Fig. 8], where a Patagonian is drawn side by side with a Bushman, whose head only reaches to his breast. Thus the tallest race of man is less than one-fourth higher than the shortest, a fact which seems surprising to those not used to measurements. Struck by the effect of such difference of stature one is apt to form an exaggerated notion of its amount, which is really small compared with the disproportion in size between various breeds of other species of animals, as the toy pug and the mastiff, or the Shetland pony and the dray-horse. In general, the stature of the women of any race may be taken as about one-sixteenth less than that of the men. Thus in England a man of 5 ft. 8 in. and a woman of 5 ft. 4 in. look an ordinary well-matched couple.

Fig. 8.—Patagonian and Bushman.

Not only the stature, but the proportions of the body differ in men of various races. Care must be taken not to confuse real race-differences with the alterations made by the individual’s early training or habit of life, such as the bow-legs of grooms, and the still more crooked legs of the Indians of British Columbia, who get them misshaped by continually sitting cramped up in their canoes. A man’s measure round the chest depends a good deal on his way of life, as do also the lengths of arm and leg, which are not even the same in soldiers and sailors. But there are certain distinctions which are inherited, and mark different races. Thus there are long-limbed and short-limbed tribes of mankind. The African negro is remarkable for length of arm and leg, the Aymara Indian of Peru for shortness. Supposing an ordinary Englishman to be altered to the build of a negro, he would want 2 in. more in the arm and 1 in. more in the leg, while to bring him to the proportions of an Aymara his arm would have to be shortened ½ in. and his leg 1 in. from their present lengths. An instructive way of noticing these differences is to look back to the skeletons of apes and man ([Fig. 5]). In an upright position and reaching down with the middle finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, the orang its ankle, the chimpanzee its knee, while man only reaches partly down his thigh. Here, however, there seems to be a real distinction among the races of man. Negro soldiers standing at drill bring the middle finger-tip an inch or two nearer the knee than white men can do, and some have been even known to touch the knee-pan. Such differences, however, are less remarkable than the general correspondence in bodily proportions of a model of strength and beauty, to whatever race he may belong. Even good judges have been led to forget the niceties of race-type and to treat the form of the athlete as everywhere one and the same. Thus Benjamin West, the American painter, when he came to Rome and saw the Belvedere Apollo, exclaimed, “It is a young Mohawk warrior!” Much the same has been said of the proportions of Zulu athletes. Yet if fairly-chosen photographs of Kafirs be compared with a classic model such as the Apollo, it will be noticed that the trunk of the African has a somewhat wall-sided straightness, wanting in the inward slope which gives fineness to the waist, and in the expansion below which gives breadth across the hips, these being two of the most noticeable points in the classic model which our painters recognise as an ideal of manly beauty. By this kind of comparison much may be done in distinguishing standard types of races. Yet, while acknowledging the reality of such varieties in the build of men of different race, we have again to remark how slight they are compared with the variation in the limbs of different breeds of lower animals.

In comparing races, one of the first questions that occurs is whether people who differ so much intellectually as savage tribes and civilized nations, show any corresponding difference in their brain. There is, in fact, a considerable difference. The most usual way of ascertaining the quantity of brain is to measure the capacity of the brain-case by filling skulls with shot or seed. Professor Flower gives as a mean estimate of the contents of skulls in cubic inches, Australian, seventy-nine; African, eighty-five; European, ninety-one. Eminent anatomists also think that the brain of the European is somewhat more complex in its convolutions than the brain of a Negro or Hottentot. Thus, though these observations are far from perfect, they show a connexion between a more full and intricate system of brain-cells and fibres, and a higher intellectual power, in the races which have risen in the scale of civilization.

The form of the skull itself, so important in its relation to the brain within and the expressive features without, has been to the anatomist one of the best means of distinguishing races. It is often possible to tell by inspection of a skull what race it belongs to. The narrow cranium of the negro ([Fig. 9] a) would not be mistaken for the broad cranium of the Samoyed ([Fig. 9] c.) On taking down from a museum shelf a certain narrow, wall-sided, roof-topped, forward-jawed skull with unusually strong brow-ridges ([Fig. 10] d), there is no difficulty in recognising it as Australian. In comparing skulls, some of the most easily noticeable distinctions are the following.

Fig. 9.—Top view of skulls. a, Negro, index 70, dolichokephalic; b, European, index 80, mesokephalic; c, Samoyed, index 85, brachykephalic.

When looked at from the vertical or top view, the proportion of breadth to length is seen as in [Fig. 9]. Taking the diameter from back to front as 100, the cross diameter gives the so-called index of breadth, which is here about 70 in the Negro (a), 80 in the European (b), and 85 in the Samoyed (c). Such skulls are classed respectively as dolichokephalic, or “long-headed;” mesokephalic, or “middle-headed;” and brachykephalic, or “short-headed.” A model skull of a flexible material like gutta-percha, if of the middle shape, like that of an ordinary Englishman, might, by pressure at the sides, be made long like a negro’s, or by pressure at back and front be brought to the broad Tatar form. In the above figure it may be noticed that while some skulls, as b, have a somewhat elliptical form, others, as a, are ovoid, having the longest cross diameter considerably behind the centre. Also in some classes of skulls, as in a, the zygomatic arches connecting the skull and face are fully seen; while in others, as b and c, the bulging of the skull almost hides them. In the front and back view of skulls, the proportion of width to height is taken in much the same way as the index of breadth just described. Next, [Fig. 10], which represents in profile the skulls of an Australian (d), a negro (e), and an Englishman (f), shows the strong difference in the facial angle between the two lower races and our own. The Australian and African are prognathous, or “forward-jawed,” while the European is orthognathous, or “upright-jawed.” At the same time the Australian and African have more retreating foreheads than the European, to the disadvantage of the frontal lobes of their brain as compared with ours. Thus the upper and lower parts of the profile combine to give the faces of these less-civilized peoples a somewhat ape-like slope, as distinguished from the more nearly upright European face.

Fig. 10.—Side view of skulls. d, Australian, prognathous; e, African, prognathous; f, European, orthognathous.

Fig. 11.—a, Swaheli; b, Persian.

Fig. 12.—Female portraits. a, Negro (W. Africa); b, Barolong (S. Africa); c, Hottentot; d, Gilyak (N. Asia); e, Japanese; f, Colorado Indian (N. America); g, English.

Fig. 13.—African negro.

Not to go into nicer distinctions of cranial measurement, let us now glance at the evident points of the living face. To some extent feature directly follows the shape of the skull beneath. Thus the contrast just mentioned, between the forward-sloping negro skull and its more upright form in the white race, is as plainly seen in the portraits of a Swaheli negro and a Persian, given in [Fig. 11]. On looking at the female portraits in [Fig. 12], the Barolong girl (South Africa) may be selected as an example of the effect of narrowness of skull (b), in contrast with the broader Tatar, and North American faces (d, f). She also shows the convex African forehead, while they, as well as the Hottentot (c), show the effect of high cheek-bones. The Tatar and Japanese faces (d, e) show the skew-eyelids of the Mongolian race. Much of the character of the human face depends on the shape of the softer parts—nose, lips, cheeks, chin, &c., which are often excellent marks to distinguish race. Contrasts in the form of nose may even exceed that here shown between the aquiline of the Persian and the snub of the Negro in [Figs. 11 and 13]. European travellers in Tartary in the middle ages described its flat-nosed inhabitants as having no noses at all, but breathing through holes in their faces. By pushing the tips of our own noses upward, we can in some degree imitate the manner in which various other races, notably the negro, show the opening of the nostrils in full face. Our thin, close-fitting lips, differ in the extreme from those of the negro, well seen in the portrait ([Fig. 13]) of Jacob Wainwright, Livingstone’s faithful boy. We cannot imitate the negro lip by mere pouting, but must push the edges up and down with the fingers to show more of the inner lip. The expression of the human face, on which intelligence and feeling write themselves in visible characters, requires an artist’s training to understand and describe. The mere contour of the features, as taken by photography in an unchanging attitude, has delicate characters which we appreciate by long experience in studying faces, but which elude exact description or measurement. With the purpose of calling attention to some well-marked peculiarities of the human face in different races, a small group of female faces ([Fig. 12]) is here given, all young, and such as would be considered among their own people as at least moderately handsome. Setting aside hair and complexion, there is still enough difference in the actual outline of the features to distinguish the Negro, Kafir, Hottentot, Tatar, Japanese, and North American faces from the English face below.

Fig. 14.—Section of negro skin, much magnified (after Kölliker). a, dermis, or true skin; b, c, rete mucosum; d, epidermis, or scarf-skin.

The colour of the skin, that important mark of race, may be best understood by looking at the darkest variety. The dark hue of the negro does not lie so deep as the innermost or true skin, which is substantially alike among all races of mankind. The seat of the colouring is well shown in [Fig. 14], a highly magnified section of the skin of a negro. Here a shows the surface of the true skin with its papillæ; this is covered by the mucous layer, the innermost cells of which (b) are deeply coloured by small grains of black or brown pigment, the colour shading down to brownish or yellowish toward the outer surface of this mucous layer (c), while even the outside scarf-skin (d) is slightly tinged. The negro, in spite of his name, is not black, but deep brown, and even this darkest hue does not appear at the beginning of life, for the new-born negro child is reddish brown, soon becoming slaty grey, and then darkening. Nor does the darkest tint ever extend over the negro’s whole body, but his soles and palms are brown. When Blumenbach, the anthropologist, saw Kemble play Othello (made up in the usual way, with blackened face and black gloves, to represent a negro) he complained that the whole illusion was spoilt for him when the actor opened his hands. The brown races, such as the native Americans, have the colouring of the skin in a less degree than the Africans, and with them also it is not till some time after birth that the full depth of complexion is reached. The colouring of the dark races appears to be similar in nature to the temporary freckling and sun-burning of the fair white race. Also, Europeans have permanent dark colouring in some portions of the skin, though not exposed to the sun; the areola of the breast, for instance; while in certain affections, known by the medical name of melanism, patches closely resembling negro skin appear on the body. On the whole it seems that the distinction of colour, from the fairest Englishman to the darkest African, has no hard and fast lines, but varies gradually from one tint to another. It is instructive to notice that there occur in the various races certain individuals in whom the colouring matter of the skin is wanting, the so-called albinos. The contrast between their morbid whiteness and any ordinary fairness of complexion is most remarkable in the negro albinos (to call them by this self-contradictory term), who have the well-known African features, but in dead white, as it were a cast of a negro in plaster.

The natural hue of skin farthest from that of the negro is the complexion of the fair race of Northern Europe, of which perfect types are to be met with in Scandinavia, North Germany, and England. In such fair or blonde people the almost transparent skin has its pink tinge by showing the small blood-vessels through it. In the nations of Southern Europe, such as Italians and Spaniards, the browner complexion to some extent hides this red, which among darker peoples in other quarters of the world ceases to be discernible. Thus the difference between light and dark races is well observed in their blushing, which is caused by the rush of hot red blood into the vessels near the surface of the body. Albinos shows this with the utmost intenseness, not only a general glow appearing, but the patches of colour being clearly marked out. The blush, vivid through the blonde skin of the Dane, is more obscurely seen in the Spanish brunette; but in the dark-brown Peruvian, or the yet blacker African, though a hand or a thermometer put to the cheek will detect the blush by its heat, the somewhat increased depth of colour is hardly perceptible to the eye. The contrary effect, paleness, caused by retreat of blood from the surface, is in like manner masked by dark tints of skin.

As a character of race, the colour of the skin has from ancient times been reckoned the most distinctive of all. The Egyptian painters, three or four thousand years ago used regular tints for this purpose, as may be seen in paintings at the British Museum. These colours do not pretend to be exact, as is seen by the native Egyptian gentlemen being painted dark brick-red, but the ladies pale yellow, so as to signify in an exaggerated way their lighter complexion. It was in this conventional manner that they coloured the four principal races of mankind known to them, the Egyptians themselves red-brown, the nations of Palestine yellow-brown, the Libyans yellow-white, and the Æthiopians coal-black (see [page 4]). In the history of the world, colour has often been the sign by which nations accounting themselves the nobler have marked off their inferiors. The Sanskrit word for caste is varna, that is, “colour;” and this shows how their distinction of high and low caste arose. India was inhabited by dark indigenous peoples before the fairer Aryan race invaded the land, and the descendants of conquerors and conquered are still in some measure to be traced among the light-complexioned high-caste, and the dark-complexioned low-caste families. Nor has the distinction of colour ceased in the midst of modern civilization. The Englishman’s white skin is to him, as of old, a caste-mark of separation from the yellow, brown, or black “natives,” as he contemptuously calls them, in other quarters of the globe.

The range of complexion among mankind, beginning with the tint of the fair-whites of Northern Europe and the dark-whites of Southern Europe, passes to the brownish-yellow of the Malays, and the full-brown of American tribes, the deep-brown of Australians, and the black-brown of Negros. Until modern times these race-tints have generally been described with too little care, and named as conventionally as the Egyptians painted them. Now, however, the traveller by using Broca’s set of pattern colours, records the colour of any tribe he is observing, with the accuracy of a mercer matching a piece of silk. The evaporation from the human skin is accompanied by a smell which differs in different races. The peculiar rancid scent by which the African negro may be detected even at a distance is the most marked of these. The odour of the brown American tribes is again different, while they have been known, to express dislike at the white man’s smell. This peculiarity, which not only indicates difference in the secretions of the skin, but seems connected with liability to certain fevers, &c., is a race-character of some importance.

The part of the human body which shows the greatest variety of colour in different individuals, is the iris of the eye. This is the more noticeable because the adjacent parts vary particularly little among mankind. The sclerotic coat, which in a healthy European is almost what it is called, the “white” of the eye, only takes a slightly yellow tinge among the darkest races, as the African negro. Again, in ordinary eyes of all races, the pupil in the centre of the iris appears absolutely black, being in fact transparent, and showing through to the black pigment lining the choroid coat at the back of the eye. But the iris itself, if examined in a number of types of men, has most various colour. In understanding the coloration of the eye, as of the skin, the peculiarities of albinos are instructive. The pink of their eyes (as of white rabbits) is caused by absence of the black pigment above-mentioned, so that light passing out through the iris and pupil is tinged red from the blood-vessels at the back; thus their eyes may be seen to blush with the rest of the face. This want of the protecting black pigment also accounts for the sensitiveness to light which makes albinos avoid a glare; it was for this reason that the Dutch gave them the name of kakkerlaken, or “cockroaches,” these creatures also shunning the light. Prof. Broca, in his scale of colours of eyes, arranges shades of orange, green, blue, and violet-grey. But one has only to look closely into any eye to see the impossibility of recording its complex pattern of colours; indeed what is done is to observe it from a distance so that its tints blend into one uniform hue. It need hardly be said that what are popularly called black eyes are far from having the iris really black like the pupil; eyes described as black are commonly of the deepest shades of brown or violet. These so-called black eyes are by far the most numerous in the world, belonging not only to brown-black, brown, and yellow races, but even prevailing among the darker varieties of the white race, such as Greeks and Spaniards. Aristotle remarks that the colour of the eyes follows that of the skin. Indeed it is plain that there is a connection of the colours of the skin, eyes, and hair among mankind. In races with the darker skin and black hair, the darkest eyes generally prevail, while a fair complexion is usually accompanied by the lighter tints of iris, especially blue. A fair Saxon with black eyes, or a full-grown negro with pale blue eyes, would be looked at with surprise. Yet we know by our own country-people how difficult it is to lay down exact rules as to matching colours in complexion. Thus the combination of black hair with dark blue or grey eyes is frequent in some districts of Great Britain. Dr. Barnard Davis and Dr. Beddoe think it indicates Keltic blood.

From ancient times, the colour and form of the hair have been noticed as distinctive marks of race. Thus Strabo mentions the Æthiopians as black men with woolly hair, and Tacitus describes the German warriors of his day with their fierce blue eyes and tawny hair. As to colour of hair, the most usual is black, or shades so dark as to be taken for black, which belongs not only to the dark-skinned Africans and Americans, but to the yellow Chinese and the dark-whites such as Hindus or Jews. Mr. Sorby remarks that blackness of hair is due to black pigment being present in such quantity as to overpower whatever red or yellow pigment the hair may also contain. In the fair-white peoples of Northern Europe, on the contrary, flaxen or chestnut hair prevails. Thus we see that there is a connection between fair hair and fair skin, and dark hair and dark skin. But it is impossible to lay down a rule for intermediate tints, for the red-brown or auburn hair common in fair-skinned peoples occurs among darker races, and dark-brown hair has a still wider range. Our own extremely mixed nation shows every variety from flaxen and golden to raven black. As to the form of the hair, its well-known differences may be seen in the female portraits in [Fig. 12], where the Africans on the left show the woolly or frizzy kind, where the hair naturally curls into little corkscrew-spirals, while the Asiatic and American heads on the right have straight hair like a horse’s mane. Between these extreme kinds are the flowing or wavy hair, and the curly hair which winds in large spirals; the English hair in the figure is rather of the latter variety. If cross sections of single hairs are examined under the microscope, their differences of form are seen as in four of the sections by Pruner-Bey ([Fig. 15]). The almost circular Mongolian hair (a) hangs straight; the more curly European hair (b) has an oval or elliptical section; the woolly African hair (c) is more flattened; while the frizzy Papuan hair (d) is a yet more extreme example of the flattened ribbon-like kind. Curly and woolly hair has a lop-sided growth from the root which gives the twist. Not only the colour and form of the hair, but its quantity, vary in different races. Thus the heads of the Bushmen are more scantily furnished with hair than ours, while among the Crow Indians it was common for the warrior’s coarse black hair to sweep on the ground behind him. The body-hair also is scanty in some races and plentiful in others. Thus the Ainos, the indigenes of Yeso, are a shaggy people, while the Japanese possessors of their island are comparatively hairless. So strong is the contrast, that the Japanese have invented a legend that in ancient times the Aino mothers suckled young bears, which gradually developed into men.

Fig. 15.—Sections of hair, highly magnified (after Pruner). a, Japanese; b, German; c, African negro; d, Papuan.

That certain races are constitutionally fit and others unfit for certain climates, is a fact which the English have but too good reason to know, when on the scorching plains of India they themselves become languid and sickly, while their children have soon to be removed to some cooler climate that they may not pine and die. It is well-known also that races are not affected alike by certain diseases. While in Equatorial Africa or the West Indies the coast-fever and yellow-fever are so fatal or injurious to the new-come Europeans, the negros and even mulattos are almost untouched by this scourge of the white nations. On the other hand, we English look upon measles as a trifling complaint, and hear with astonishment of its being carried into Fiji, and there, aggravated no doubt by improper treatment, sweeping away the natives by thousands. It is plain that nations moving into a new climate, if they are to flourish, must become adapted in body to the new state of life; thus in the rarefied air of the high Andes more respiration is required than in the plains, and in fact tribes living there have the chest and lungs developed to extraordinary size. Races, though capable of gradual acclimatization, must not change too suddenly the climate they are adapted to. With this adaptation to particular climates the complexion has much to do, fitting the negro for the tropics and the fair-white for the temperate zone; though, indeed, colour does not always vary with climate, as where in America the brown race extends through hot and cold regions alike. Fitness for a special climate, being matter of life or death to a race, must be reckoned among the chief of race-characters.

Travellers notice striking distinctions in the temper of races. There seems no difference of condition between the native Indian and the African negro in Brazil to make the brown man dull and sullen, while the black is overflowing with eagerness and gaiety. So, in Europe, the unlikeness between the melancholy Russian peasant and the vivacious Italian can hardly depend altogether on climate and food and government. There seems to be in mankind inbred temperament and inbred capacity of mind. History points the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers between such tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the Old World nations who overmatch and subdue them. In measuring the minds of the lower races, a good test is how far their children are able to take a civilized education. The account generally given by European teachers who have had the children of lower races in their schools is that, though these often learn as well as the white children up to about twelve years old, they then fall off, and are left behind by the children of the ruling race. This fits with what anatomy teaches of the less development of brain in the Australian and African than in the European. It agrees also with what the history of civilization teaches, that up to a certain point savages and barbarians are like what our ancestors were and our peasants still are, but from this common level the superior intellect of the progressive races has raised their nations to heights of culture. The white man, though now dominant over the world, must remember that intellectual progress has been by no means the monopoly of his race. At the dawn of history, the leaders of culture were the brown Egyptians, and the Babylonians, whose Akkadian is not connected with the language of white nations, while the yellow Chinese, whose Tatar affinity is evident in their hair and features, have been for four thousand years or more a civilized and literary nation. The dark-whites, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, did not start but carried on the forward movement of culture, while since then the fair-whites, as part of the population of France, Germany, and England, have taken their share not meanly though latest in the world’s progress.

Fig. 16.—Race or Population arranged by Stature (Galton’s method).

After thus noticing some of the chief points of difference among races, it will be well to examine more closely what a race is. Single portraits of men and women can only in a general way represent the nation they belong to, for no two of its individuals are really alike, not even brothers. What is looked for in such a race-portrait is the general character belonging to the whole race. It is an often repeated observation of travellers that a European landing among some people unlike his own, such as Chinese or Mexican Indians, at first thinks them all alike. After days of careful observation he makes out their individual peculiarities, but at first his attention was occupied with the broad typical characters of the foreign race. It is just this broad type that the anthropologist desires to sketch and describe, and he selects as his examples such portraits of men and women as show it best. It is even possible to measure the type of a people. To give an idea of the working of this problem, let us suppose ourselves to be examining Scotchmen, and the first point to be settled how tall they are. Obviously there are some few as short as Lapps, and some as tall as Patagonians; these very short and tall men belong to the race, and yet are not its ordinary members. If, however, the whole population were measured and made to stand in order of height, there would be a crowd of men about five feet eight inches, but much fewer of either five feet four inches or six feet, and so on till the numbers decreased on either side to one or two giants, and one or two dwarfs. This is seen in [Fig. 16], where each individual is represented by a dot, and the dots representing men of the mean or typical stature crowd into a mass. After looking at this, the reader will more easily understand Quetelet’s diagram, [Fig. 17], where the heights or ordinates of the binomial curve show the numbers of men of each stature, decreasing both ways from the central five feet eight inches which is the stature of the mean or typical man. Here, in a total of near 2,600 men, there are 160 of five feet eight inches, but only about 150 of five feet seven inches or five feet nine inches, and so on, till not even ten men are found so short as five feet or so tall as six feet four inches. As the proverb says, “it takes all sorts to make a world,” so it thus appears that a race is a body of people comprising a regular set of variations, which centre round one representative type. In the same way a race or nation is estimated as to other characters, as where a mean or typical Englishman may be said to measure 36 inches round the chest, and weigh about 144 pounds. So it is possible to fix on the typical shade of complexion in a nation, such as the Zulu black-brown. The result of these plans is to show that the rough-and-ready method of the traveller is fairly accurate, when he chooses as his representative of a race the type of man and woman which he finds to exist more numerously than any other.

Fig. 17.—Race or Population arranged by Stature (Quetelet’s method).

Fig. 18.—Caribs.

Fig. 19.—(a) Head of Rameses II., Ancient Egypt. (b) Sheikh’s son, Modern Egypt. (After Hartmann.)

The people whom it is easiest to represent by single portraits are uncivilised tribes, in whose food and way of life there is little to cause difference between one man and another, and who have lived together and intermarried for many generations. Thus [Fig. 18], taken from a photograph of a party of Caribs, is remarkable for the close likeness running through all. In such a nation the race-type is peculiarly easy to make out. It is by no means always thus easy to represent a whole population. To see how difficult it may be, one has only to look at an English crowd, with its endless diversity. But to get a view of the problem of human varieties, it is best to attend to the simplest cases first, looking at some uniform and well-marked race, and asking what in the course of ages may happen to it.

The first thing to be noticed is its power of lasting. Where a people lives on in its own district, without too much change in habits, or mixture with other nations, there seems no reason to expect its type to alter. The Egyptian monuments show good instances of this permanence. In [Fig. 19], a is drawn from the head of a statue of Rameses, evidently a careful portrait, and dating from about 3,000 years ago, while b is an Egyptian of the present day, yet the ancient and modern are curiously alike. Indeed, the ancient Egyptian race, who built the Pyramids, and whose life of toil is pictured on the walls of the tombs, are with little change still represented by the fellahs of the villages, who carry on the old labour under new tax-gatherers. Thus, too, the Æthiopians on the early Egyptian bas-reliefs may have their counterparts picked out still among the White Nile tribes, while we recognise in the figures of Phœnician or Israelite captives the familiar Jewish profile of our own day. Thus there is proof that a race may keep its special characters plainly recognizable for over thirty centuries, or a hundred generations. And this permanence of type may more or less remain when the race migrates far from its early home, as when African negroes are carried into America, or Israelites naturalize themselves from Archangel to Singapore. Where marked change has taken place in the appearance of a nation, the cause of this change must be sought in intermarriage with foreigners, or altered conditions of life, or both.

Fig. 20.—Malay Mother and Half-caste Daughters.

The result of intermarriage or crossing of races is familiar to all English people in one of its most conspicuous examples, the cross between white and negro called mulatto (Spanish mulato, from mula, a mule). The mulatto complexion and hair are intermediate between those of the parents, and new intermediate grades of complexion appear in the children of white and mulatto, called quadroon or quarter-blood (Spanish cuarteron), and so on; on the other hand, the descendants of negro and mulatto, called sambo (Spanish zambo) return towards the full negro type. This intermediate character is the general nature of crossed races, but with more or less tendency to revert to one or other of the parent types. To illustrate this, [Fig. 20] gives the portrait of a Malay mother and her half-caste daughters, the father being a Spaniard; here, while all the children show their mixed race, it is sometimes the European and sometimes the Malay cast of features that prevails. The effect of mixture is also traceable in the hair, as may often be well noticed in a mulatto’s crimped, curly locks, between the straighter European and the woolly African kind. The Cafusos of Brazil, a peculiar cross between the native tribes of the land and the imported negro slaves, are remarkable for their hair, which rises in a curly mass, forming a natural periwig which obliges the wearers to stoop low in passing through their hut doors. This is seen in the portrait of a Cafusa, [Fig. 21], and seems easily accounted for by the long stiff hair of the native American having acquired in some degree the negro frizziness. The bodily temperament of mixed races also partakes of the parent-characters, as is seen in the mulatto who inherits from his negro ancestry the power of bearing a tropical climate, as well as freedom from yellow fever.

Fig. 21.—Cafusa Woman.

Not only does a mixed race arise wherever two races inhabit the same district, but within the last few centuries it is well known that a large fraction of the world’s population has actually come into existence by race-crossing. This is nowhere so evident as on the American continent, where since the Spanish conquest such districts as Mexico are largely peopled by the mestizo descendants of Spaniards and native Americans, while the importation of African slaves in the West Indies has given rise to a mulatto population. By taking into account such intercrossing of races, anthropologists have a reason to give for the endless shades of diversity among mankind, without attempting the hopeless task of classifying every little uncertain group of men into a special race. The water-carrier from Cairo, in [Fig. 22], may serve as an example of the difficulty of making a systematic arrangement to set each man down to his precise race. This man speaks Arabic, and is a Moslem, but he is not an Arab proper, neither is he an Egyptian of the old kingdom, but the child of a land where the Nubian, Copt, Syrian, Bedouin, and many other peoples have mingled for ages, and in fact his ancestry may come out of three quarters of the globe. Among the natives of India, a variety of complexion and feature is found which cannot be classified exactly by race. But it must be remembered that several very distinct varieties of men have contributed to the population of the country, namely the dark-brown indigenes or hill-tribes, the yellow Mongolians who have crossed the frontiers from Tibet, and the fairer ancient Aryans or Indo-Europeans who poured in from the north-west; not to mention others, the mixture of these nations going on for ages has of course produced numberless crosses. So in Europe, taking the fair nations of the Baltic and the dark nations of the Mediterranean as two distinct races or varieties, their intercrossing may explain the infinite diversity of brown hair and intermediate complexion to be met with. If then it may be considered that man was already divided into a few great main races in remote antiquity, their intermarriage through ages since will go far to account for the innumerable slighter varieties which shade into one another.

Fig. 22.—Cairene.

It is not enough to look at a race of men as a mere body of people happening to have a common type or likeness. For the reason of their likeness is plain, and indeed our calling them a race means that we consider them a breed whose common nature is inherited from common ancestors. Now experience of the animal world shows that a race or breed, while capable of carrying on its likeness from generation to generation, is also capable of varying. In fact, the skilful cattle-breeder, by carefully choosing and pairing individuals which vary in a particular direction, can within a few years form a special breed of cattle or sheep. Without such direct interference of man, special races or breeds of animals form themselves under new conditions of climate and food, as in the familiar instances of the Shetland ponies, or the mustangs of the Mexican plains which have bred from the horses brought over by the Spaniards. It naturally suggests itself that the races of man may be thus accounted for as breeds, varied from one original stock. It may be strongly argued in this direction that not only do the bodily and mental varieties of mankind blend gradually into one another, but that even the most dissimilar races can intermarry in all directions, producing mixed or sub-races which, when left to themselves, continue their own kind. Advocates of the polygenist theory, that there are several distinct races of man, sprung from independent origins, have denied that certain races, such as the English and native Australians, produce fertile half-breeds. But the evidence tends more and more to establish crossing as possible between all races, which goes to prove that all the varieties of mankind are zoologically of one species. While this principle seems to rest on firm ground, it must be admitted that our knowledge of the manner and causes of race-variation among mankind is still very imperfect. The great races, black, brown, yellow, white, had already settled into their well-known characters before written record began, so that their formation is hidden far back in the præhistoric period. Nor are alterations of such amount known to have taken place in any people within the range of history. It has been plausibly argued that our rude primitive ancestors, being less able than their posterity to make themselves independent of climate by shelter and fire and stores of food, were more exposed to alter in body under the influence of the new climates they migrated into. Even in modern times, it seems possible to trace something of race-change going on under new conditions of life. Thus Dr. Beddoe’s measurements prove that in England the manufacturing town-life has given rise to a population an inch or two less in stature than their forefathers when they came in from their country villages. So in the Rocky Mountains there are clans of Snake Indians whose stunted forms and low features, due to generations of needy outcast life, mark them off from their better nourished kinsfolk in the plains. It is asserted that the pure negro in the United States has undergone a change in a few generations which has left him a shade lighter in complexion and altered his features, while the pure white in the same region has become less rosy, with darker and more glossy hair, more prominent cheek-bones and massive lower jaw. These are perhaps the best authenticated cases of race-change. There is great difficulty in watching a race undergoing variation, which is everywhere masked by the greater changes caused by new nations coming in to mingle and intermarry with the old. He who should argue from the Greek sculptures that the national type has changed since the age of Perikles, would be met with the answer that the remains of the old stock have long been inextricably blended with others. The points which have now been brought forward will suffice to show the uncertainty and difficulty of any attempt to trace exactly the origin and course of the races of man. Yet at the same time there is a ground-work to go upon in the fact that these races are not found spread indiscriminately over the earth’s surface, but certain races plainly belong to certain regions, seeming each to have taken shape under the influences of climate and soil in its proper district, where it flourished, and whence it spread far and wide, modifying itself and mingling with other races as it went. The following brief sketch may give an idea how the spreading and mixture of the great races may have taken place. It embodies well-considered views of eminent anatomists, especially Professors Huxley and Flower. Though such a scheme cannot be presented as proved and certain, it is desirable to clear and fix our ideas by understanding that man’s distribution over the earth did not take place by promiscuous scattering of tribes, but along great lines of movement whose regularity can be often discerned, where it cannot be precisely followed out.

Fig. 23.—Andaman Islanders.

That there is a real connexion between the colour of races and the climate they belong to, seems most likely from the so-called black peoples. Ancient writers were satisfied to account for the colour of the Æthiopians by saying that the sun had burnt them black, and though modern anthropologists would not settle the question in this off-hand way, yet the map of the world shows that this darkest race-type is principally found in a tropical climate. The main line of black races stretches along the hot and fertile regions of the equator, from Guinea in West Africa to that great island of the Eastern Archipelago, which has its name of New Guinea from its negro-like natives. In a former geological period an equatorial continent (to which Sclater has given the name of Lemuria) may even have stretched across from Africa to the far East, uniting these now separate lands. The attention of anthropologists has been particularly attracted by a line of islands in the Sea of Bengal, the Andamans, which might have been part of this former continent, and were found inhabited by a scanty population of rude and childlike savages. These Mincopis ([Fig. 23]) are small in stature (the men under five feet), with skin of blackness, and hair very flat in section and frizzled, which from their habit of shaving their heads must be imagined by the reader. But while in these points resembling the African negro, they are unlike him in having skulls not narrow, but broad and rounded, nor have they lips so full, a nose so wide, or jaws so projecting as his. It has occurred to anatomists, and the opinion has been strengthened by Flower’s study of their skulls, that the Andaman tribes may be a remnant of a very early human stock, perhaps the best representatives of the primitive negro type which has since altered in various points in its spread over its wide district of the world. The African negro race, with its special marks of narrow skull, projecting jaws, black-brown skin, woolly hair, flattened nose, full and out-turned lips, has already been here described (see [pages 61 to 67]). Its type perhaps shows itself most perfectly in the nations near the equator, as in Guinea, but it spreads far and wide over the continent, shading off by crossing with lighter coloured races on its borders, such as the Berbers in the north, and the Arabs on the east coast. As the race spreads southward into Congo and the Kafir regions, there is noticed a less full negro complexion and feature, looking as though migration from the central region into new climates had somewhat modified the type. In this respect the small-grown Hottentot-Bushman tribes of South Africa (see [Figs. 8, 12] c) are most remarkable, for while keeping much negro character in the narrow skull, frizzy hair, and cast of features, their skin is of a lighter tint of brownish-yellow. There is nothing to suggest that this came by crossing the negro type with a fairer race, indeed there is no evidence of such a race to cross with. If the Bushman is a special modification of the Negro, then this is an excellent case of the transformation of races when placed under new conditions. To return now to Southern Asia, there are found in the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines scanty forest-tribes apparently allied to the Andamaners and classed under the general term Negritos (i.e. “little blacks”), seeming to belong to a race once widely spread over this part of the world, whose remnants have been driven by stronger new come races to find refuge in the mountains. [Fig. 24], represents one of them, an Aheta from the island of Luzon. Lastly come the wide-spread and complicated varieties of the eastern negro race in the region known as Melanesia, the “black islands,” extending from New Guinea to Fiji. The group of various islanders ([Fig. 25]) belonging to Bishop Patteson’s mission, shows plainly the resemblance to the African negro, though with some marked points of difference, as in the brows being more strongly ridged, and the nose being more prominent, even aquiline—a striking contrast to the African. The Melanesians about New Guinea are called Papuas from their woolly hair (Malay papuwah = frizzed), which is often grown into enormous mops. The great variety of colour in Melanesia, from the full brown-black down to chocolate or nut-brown, shows that there has been much crossing with lighter populations. Such mixture is evident in the coast-people of Fiji, where the dark Melanesian race is indeed predominant, but crossed with the lighter Polynesian race to which much of the language and civilization of the islands belongs. Lastly, the Tasmanians were a distant outlying population belonging to the eastern blacks.

Fig. 24.—Aheta (Negrito), Philippine Islands.

Fig. 25.—Melanesians.

Fig. 26.—South Australian (man).

Fig. 27.—South Australian (woman).

Fig. 28.—Australian (Queensland) women.

Fig. 29.—Dravidian hill-man (after Fryer).

In Australia, that vast island-continent, whose plants and animals are not those of Asia, but seem as it were survivors from a long-past period of the earth’s history, there appears a thin population of roaming savages, strongly distinct from the blacker races of New Guinea at the north, and Tasmania at the south. The Australians, with skin of dark chocolate-colour, may be taken as a special type of the brown races of man. While their skull is narrow and prognathous like the negro’s, it differs from it in special points which have been already mentioned (page 60), and has, indeed, peculiarities which distinguish it very certainly from that of other races. In the portraits of Australians, [Figs. 26, 27, 28], there may be noticed the heavy brows and projecting jaws, the wide but not flat nose, the full lips, and the curly but not woolly black hair. Looking at the map of the world to see where brown races next appear, good authorities define one on the continent of India. There the hill-tribes present the type of the old dwellers in south and central India before the conquest by the Aryan Hindus, and its purest form appears in tribes hardly tilling the soil, but living a wild life in the jungle, while the great mass, more mixed in race with the Hindus, under whose influence they have been for ages, now form the great Dravidian nations of the south, such as the Tamil and Telugu. [Fig. 29] represents one of the ruder Dravidians, from the Travancore forests. Farther west, it has been thought that a brown race may be distinguished in Africa, taking in Nubian tribes and less distinctly traceable in the Berbers of Algiers and Tunis. If so, to this race the ancient Egyptians would seem mainly to belong, though mixed with Asiatics, who from remote antiquity came in over the Syrian border. The Egyptian drawings of themselves (as in Chaps. IX. to XI.) require the eyes to be put in profile and the body coloured reddish-brown to represent the race to us. None felt more strongly than the Egyptian of ancient Thebes, that among the chief distinctions between the races of mankind were the complexion and feature which separated him from the Æthiopian on the one hand, and the Assyrian or Israelite on the other.

Fig. 30.—Kalmuk (after Goldsmid).

Fig. 31.—Goldi (Amur).

Fig. 32.—Siamese actresses.

Turning to another district of the world, the Mongoloid type of man has its best marked representatives on the vast steppes of northern Asia. Their skin is brownish-yellow, their hair of the head black, coarse, and long, but face-hair scanty. Their skull is characterized by breadth, projection of cheek-bones, and forward position of the outer edge of the orbits, which, as well as the slightness of brow-ridges, the slanting aperture of the eyes, and the snub-nose, are observable in [Figs. 30 and 31], and in [Fig. 12] d. The Mongoloid race is immense in range and numbers. The great nations of south-east Asia show their connexion with it in the familiar complexion and features of the Chinese and Japanese. [Figs. 32, 33, 34] are portraits from Siam, Cochin-China, and Corea. In his wide migrations over the world, the Mongoloid, through change of climate and life, and still farther by intermarriage with other races, loses more and more of his special points. It is so in the South-east, where in China and Japan the characteristic breadth of skull is lessened. In Europe, where from remotest antiquity hordes of Tatar race have poured in, their descendants have often preserved in their languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish, clearer traces of their Asiatic home than can be made out in their present types of complexion and feature. Yet the Finns, [Figs. 35 and 36], have not lost the race-differences which mark them off from the Swedes among whom they dwell, and the stunted Lapps show some points of likeness to their Siberian kinsfolk, who wander like them with their reindeer on the limits of the Arctic regions.

Fig. 33.—Cochin-Chinese.

Fig. 34.—Coreans.

Fig. 35.—Finn (man).

Fig. 36.—Finn (woman).

Fig. 37.—Malays.

Fig. 38.—Malays.

In pursuing beyond this point the examination of the races of the world, the problem becomes more obscure. On the Malay peninsula, at the extreme south-east corner of Asia, appear the first members of the Malay race, seemingly a distant branch of the Mongoloid, which spreads over Sumatra, Java, and other islands of the Eastern Archipelago. [Figs. 37 and 38] give portraits of the more civilised Malays, while [Fig. 39] shows the Dayaks of Borneo, who represent the race in a wilder and perhaps less mixed state. From the Malay Archipelago there stretch into the Pacific the island ranges first of Micronesia and then of Polynesia, till we reach Easter Island to the east and New Zealand to the south. The Micronesians and Polynesians show connexion with the Malays in language, and more or less in bodily make. But they are not Malays proper, and there are seen among them high faces, narrow noses, and small mouths which remind us of the European face, as in the Micronesian, [Fig. 40], who stands here to represent this varied group of peoples. The Maoris are still further from being pure Malays, as is seen by their more curly hair, often prominent and even aquiline noses. It seems likely that an Asiatic race closely allied to Malays may have spread over the South Sea Islands, altering their special type by crossing with the dark Melanesians, so that now the populations of different island groups often vary much in appearance. This race of sailors even found their way to Madagascar, where their descendants have more or less blended with a population from the continent of Africa.

Fig. 39.—Dayaks.

Fig. 40.—Kingsmill Islander.

Turning now to the double continent of America, we find in this New World a problem of race remarkably different from that of the Old World. The traveller who should cross the earth from Nova Zemlya to the Cape of Good Hope or Van Diemen’s Land would find in its various climates various strongly-marked kinds of men, white, yellow, brown, and black. But if Columbus had surveyed America from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, he would have found no such extreme unlikeness in the inhabitants. Apart from the Europeans and Africans who have poured in since the fifteenth century, the native Americans in general might be, as has often been said, of one race. Not that they are all alike, but their differences in stature, form of skull, feature, and complexion, though considerable, seem variations of a secondary kind. It is not as if several races had formed each its proper type in its proper region, but as if the country had been peopled by migrating tribes of a ready-made race, who had only to spread and acclimatise themselves over both tropical and temperate zones, much as the European horses have done since the time of Columbus, and less perfectly the white men themselves. The race to which most anthropologists refer the native Americans is the Mongoloid of East Asia, who are capable of accommodating themselves to the extremest climates, and who by the form of skull, the light-brown skin, straight black hair, and black eyes, show considerable agreement with the American tribes. [Figs. 41 and 42] represent the wild hunting-tribes of North America in one of the finest forms now existing, the Colorado Indians, while in [Fig. 43] the Cauixana Indians may stand as examples of the rude and sluggish forest-men of Brazil. While tribes of America and Asia may thus be of one original stock, we must look cautiously at theories as to the ocean and island routes by which Asiatics may have migrated to people the New World. It is probable that man had appeared there, as in the Old World, in an earlier geological period than the present, so that the first kinship between the Mongols and the North American Indians may go back to a time when there was no ocean between them. What looks like later communication between the two continents, is that the stunted Eskimo with their narrow roof-topped skulls may be a branch of the Japanese stock, while there are signs of the comparatively civilized Mexicans and Peruvians having in some way received arts and ideas from Asiatic nations.

Fig. 41.—Colorado Indian (North America).

Fig. 42.—Colorado Indian (North America).

Fig. 43.—Cauixana Indians (South America).

We come last to the white men, whose nations have all through history been growing more and more dominant intellectually, morally, and politically on the earth. Though commonly spoken of as one variety of mankind, it is plain that they are not a single uniform race, but a varied and mixed population. It is a step toward classing them to separate them into two great divisions, the dark-whites and fair-whites (melanochroi, xanthochroi). Ancient portraits have come down to us of the dark-white nations, as Assyrians, Phœnicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans; and when beside these are placed moderns such as the Andalusians, and the dark Welshmen or Bretons, and people from the Caucasus, it will be evident that the resemblance running through all these can only be in broad and general characters. They have a dusky or brownish-white skin, black or deep brown eyes, black hair, mostly wavy or curly; their skulls vary much in proportions, though seldom extremely broad or narrow, while the profile is upright, the nose straight or aquiline, the lips less full than in other races. Rather for form’s sake than for a real type of the dark-whites, a group of Georgians are shown in [Fig. 44]. Opposite them [Fig. 45], a group of Swedes, somewhat better represents the fair-whites, whose transparent skin, flaxen hair, and blue eyes may be seen as well, though not as often, in England as in Scandinavia or North Germany. The earliest recorded appearance of fair-whites may be in the paintings where Egyptian artists represent with yellowish-white skin and blue eyes certain natives of North Africa, a district where remnants of blonde tribes are still known. These fair Libyans, as well as the fair red-haired people who appear about Syria, and are known to us as forming a type among the Jews, may perhaps be connected in race with the fair nations who were already settled over the north of Europe when the classic writers begin to give accounts of its barbarous inhabitants, from the Goths northward to the dwellers in Thule. The intermarriage of the dark and fair varieties which has gone on since these early times, has resulted in numberless varieties of brown-haired people, between fair and dark in complexion. But as to the origin and first home of the fair and dark races themselves, it is hard to form an opinion. Language does much toward tracing the early history of the white nations, but it does not clear up the difficulty of separating fair-whites from dark-whites. Both sorts have been living united by national language, as at this day German is spoken by the fair Hanoverian and the darker Austrian. Among Keltic people, the Scotch Highlanders often remind us of the tall red-haired Gauls described in classical history, but there are also passages which prove that smaller darker Kelts like the modern Welsh and Bretons existed then as well. As a help in clearing up this problem, which so affects our own ancestry, Huxley suggests that the fair-whites were the original stock, and that these crossing with the brown races of the far south may have given rise to the various kinds of dark-whites. However this may be, such mixture of the white and brown races seems indeed to have largely formed the population of countries where they meet. The Moors of North Africa, and many so-called Arabs who are darker than white men, may be thus accounted for. It is thus that in India millions who speak Hindu languages show by their tint that their race is mixed between that of the Aryan conquerors of the land and its darker indigenes. An instructive instance of this very combination is to be seen in the Gypsies, low-caste wanderers who found their way from India and spread over Europe not many centuries since. [Fig. 46], a Gypsy woman from Wallachia, is a favourable type of these latest incomers from the East, whose broken-down Hindu dialect shows that part of their ancestry comes from our Aryan forefathers, while their complexion, swarthiest in the population of our country, marks also descent belonging to a darker zone of the human species.

Fig. 44.—Georgians.

Fig. 45.—Swedes.

Fig. 46.—Gypsy.

Thus to map out the nations of the world among a few main varieties of man, and their combinations, is, in spite of its difficulty and uncertainty, a profitable task. But to account for the origin of these great primary varieties or races themselves, and exactly to assign to them their earliest homes, cannot be usefully attempted in the present scantiness of evidence. If man’s first appearance was in a geological period when the distribution of land and sea and the climates of the earth were not as now, then on both sides of the globe, outside the present tropical zones, there were regions whose warmth and luxuriant vegetation would have favoured man’s life with least need of civilized arts, and whence successive waves of population may have spread over cooler climates. It may perhaps be reasonable to imagine as latest-formed the white race of the temperate region, least able to bear extreme heat or live without the appliances of culture, but gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which give them sway over the world.

CHAPTER IV.
LANGUAGE.

Sign-making, [114]—Gesture-language, [114]—Sound-gestures, [120]—Natural Language, [122]—Utterances of Animals, [122]—Emotional and Imitative Sounds in Language, [124]—Change of Sound and Sense, [127]—Other expression of Sense by Sound, [128]—Children’s Words, [128]—Articulate Language, its relation to Natural Language, [129]—Origin of Language, [130].

There are various ways in which men can communicate with one another. They can make gestures, utter cries, speak words, draw pictures, write characters or letters. These are signs of various sorts, and to understand how they do their work, let us begin by looking at such signs as are most simple and natural.

When for any reason people cannot talk together by word of mouth, they take to conversing by gestures, in what is called dumb show or pantomime. Every reader of this has been able from childhood to carry on conversation in this way, more or less cleverly. Imagine a simple case. A boy opens the parlour door, his brother sitting there beckons to him to be quiet for his father is asleep; the boy now intimates by signs that he has come for the key of the box, to which his brother answers by other signs that it is in the pocket of his coat hanging in the hall, concluding with a significant gesture to be off and shut the door quietly after him. This is the gesture-language as we all know how to use it. But to see what a full and exact means of communication it may be worked up to, it should be watched in use among the deaf-and-dumb, who have to depend so much upon it. To give an idea how far gestures can be made to do the work of spoken words, the signs may be described in which a deaf-and-dumb man once told a child’s story in presence of the writer of this account. He began by moving his hand, palm down, about a yard from the ground, as we do to show the height of a child—this meant that it was a child he was thinking of. Then he tied an imaginary pair of bonnet-strings under his chin (his usual sign for female), to make it understood that the child was a little girl. The child’s mother was then brought on the scene in a similar way. She beckons to the child and gives her twopence, these being indicated by pretending to drop two coins from one hand into the other; if there had been any doubt as to whether they were copper or silver coins, this would have been settled by pointing to something brown, or even by one’s contemptuous way of handling coppers which at once distinguishes them from silver. The mother also gives the child a jar, shown by sketching its shape with the forefingers in the air, and going through the act of handing it over. Then by imitating the unmistakeable kind of twist with which one turns a treacle-spoon, it is made known that it is treacle the child has to buy. Next, a wave of the hand shows the child being sent off on her errand, the usual sign of walking being added, which is made by two fingers walking on the table. The turning of an imaginary door-handle now takes us into the shop, where the counter is shown by passing the flat hands as it were over it. Behind this counter a figure is pointed out; he is shown to be a man by the usual sign of putting one’s hand to one’s chin and drawing it down where the beard is or would be; then the sign of tying an apron round one’s waist adds the information that the man is the shopman. To him the child gives her jar, dropping the money into his hand, and moving her forefinger as if taking up treacle, to show what she wants. Then we see the jar put into an imaginary pair of scales which go up and down; the great treacle-jar is brought from the shelf and the little one filled, with the proper twist to take up the last trickling thread; the grocer puts the two coins in the till, and the little girl sets off with the jar. The deaf-and-dumb story-teller went on to show in pantomime how the child, looking down at the jar, saw a drop of treacle on the rim, wiped it off with her finger and put the finger in her mouth, how she was tempted to take more, how her mother found her out by the spot of treacle on her pinafore, and so forth.

The student anxious to master the principles of language will find this gesture-talk so instructive, that it will be well to explain its working more closely. The signs used are of two kinds. In the first kind things actually present are shown. Thus if the deaf-mute wants to mention “hand” or “shoe,” he touches his own hand or shoe. Where a speaking man would say “I,” “thou,” “he,” the deaf-mute simply points to himself and the other persons. To express “red” or “blue” he touches the inside of his own lip or points to the sky. In the second kind of signs ideas are conveyed by imitation. Thus pretending to drink may mean “water,” or “to drink,” or “thirsty.” Laying the cheek on the hand expresses “sleep” or “bedtime.” A significant jerk of the whip-hand suggests either “whip” or “coachman,” or “to drive,” as the case may be. A “lucifer” is indicated by pretending to strike a match, and “candle” by the act of holding up the forefinger like a candle and pretending to blow it out. Also in the gesture-language the symptoms of the temper one is in may be imitated, and so become signs of the same temper in others. Thus the act of shivering becomes an expressive sign for “cold”; smiles show “joy,” “approval,” “goodness,” while frowns show “anger,” “disapproval,” “badness.” It might seem that such various meanings to one sign would be confusing, but there is a way of correcting this, for when a single sign does not make the meaning clear, others are brought in to supplement it. Thus if one wants to express “a pen,” it may not be sufficient to pretend to write with one, as that might be intended for “writing” or “letter,” but if one then pretends to wipe and hold up a pen, this will make it plain that the pen itself is meant.

The signs hitherto described are self-expressive, that is, their meaning is evident on the face of them, or at any rate may be made out by a stranger who watches their use. Of such self-expressive or natural signs, the gesture-language mostly consists. But where deaf-mutes live together, there come into use among them signs which a stranger can hardly make out until it is explained to him how they arose. They will, for instance, mention one another by nickname-signs, as when a boy may be referred to by the sign of sewing, which on inquiry proves to have been given him because his father was a tailor. Such signs may be very far-fetched; for instance, at the Berlin Deaf-and-dumb Institution, the sign of chopping off a head means a Frenchman, and on inquiry it appears that the children, struck by reading of the death of Louis XVI. in the history-book, had fixed on this as a sign-name for the whole nation. But to any new child who learnt these signs without knowing why they were chosen, they would seem artificial.

Next to studying the gesture-language among the deaf-and-dumb, the most perfect way of making out its principles is in its use by people who can talk but do not understand one another’s language. Thus the celebrated sign-languages of the American prairies, in which conversation is carried on between hunting-parties of whites and natives, and even between Indians of different tribes, are only dialects (so to speak) of the gesture-language. Thus “water” is expressed by pretending to scoop up water in one’s hand and drink it, “stag” by putting one’s thumbs to one’s temples and spreading out the fingers. There is a great deal of variety in the signs among particular tribes, but such a way of communication is so natural all the world over, that when outlandish people, such as Laplanders, have been brought to be exhibited in our great cities, they have been comforted in their loneliness by meeting with deaf-and-dumb children, with whom they at once fell to conversing with delight in the universal language of signs. Signs to be understood in this way must be of the natural self-expressive sort. Yet here also there are some which a stranger might suppose to be artificial, till he learnt that they are old signs which have lost their once plain intention. Thus a North American sign for “dog” is to draw one’s two first fingers along like poles being trailed on the ground. This seemingly senseless sign really belongs to the days when the Indians had few horses, and used to fasten the tent-poles on the dogs to be dragged from place to place; though the dogs no longer have to do this, custom keeps up the sign.

It has to be noticed that the gesture-language by no means matches, sign for word, with our spoken language. One reason is that it has so little power of expressing abstract ideas. The deaf-mute can show particular ways of making things, such as building a wall or cutting out a coat, but it is quite beyond him to make one sign include what is common to all these, as we use the abstract term to “make.” Even “in” and “out” must be expressed in some such clumsy way as by pretending to put the thing talked of in, and take it out. Next let us compare an English sentence with the signs by which the same meaning would be expressed among the deaf-and-dumb. It will at once be seen that many words we use have no signs at all corresponding to them. Thus when we should say in words, “The hat which I left on the table is black,” this statement can be practically conveyed in gestures, and there will be signs for what we may call the “real” words, such as hat, leave, black. But for what may be called the “grammatical” words, the, which, is, there will be no signs, for the gesture-language has none. Again, grammars lay down distinctions between substantives, adjectives, and verbs. But these distinctions are not to be found in the gesture-language, where pointing to a grass-plot may mean “grass” or “green,” and pretending to warm one’s hands may suggest “warm” or “to warm oneself,” or even “fireplace.” Nor (unless where artificial signs have been brought in by teachers) is there anything in the gesture-language to correspond with the inflexions of words, such as distinguish goest from go, him from he, domum from domus. What is done is to call up a picture in the minds of the spectators by first setting up something to be thought about, and then adding to or acting on it till the whole story is told. If the signs do not follow in such order as to carry meaning as they go, the looker-on will be perplexed. Thus in conveying to a deaf-and-dumb child the thought of a green box, one must make a sign for “box” first, and then show, as by pointing to the grass outside, that its colour is “green.” The proper gesture-syntax is “box green,” and if this order were reversed as it is in the English language, the child might fail to see what grass had to do with a box. Such a sentence as English “cats kill mice” does not agree with the order of the deaf-mute’s signs, which would begin by showing the tiny mouse running, then the cat with her smooth fur and whiskers, and lastly the cat’s pouncing on the mouse—as it were “mouse cat kill.”

This account of the gesture-language will have made it clear to the reader by what easy and reasonable means man can express his thoughts in visible signs. The next step will be to show the working of another sort of signs, namely, the sounds of the human voice in language. Sounds of voice may be spoken as signs to express our feelings and thoughts on much the same principles as gestures are made, except that they are heard instead of being seen.

One kind of sounds used by men as signs, consists of emotional cries or tones. Men show pain by uttering groans as well as by distortion of face; joy is expressed by shouts as well as by jumping; when we laugh aloud, the voice and the features go perfectly together. Such sounds are gestures made with the voice, sound-gestures, and the greater number of what are called interjections are of this class. By means of such cries and tones, even the complicated tempers of sympathy, or pity, or vexation, can be shown with wonderful exactness. Let any one put on a laughing, sneering, or cross face, and then talk, he may notice how his tone of voice follows; the attitude of features belonging to each particular temper acts directly on the voice, especially in affecting the musical quality of the vowels. Thus the speaker’s tones become signs of the emotion he feels, or pretends to feel. That this mode of expression is in fact musical, is shown by its being imitated on the violin, which by altering its quality of tone can change from pain to joy. The human voice uses other means of expression belonging to music, such as the contrast of low and loud, slow and quick, gentle and violent, and the changes of pitch, now rising in the scale and now falling. A speaker, by skilfully managing these various means, can carry his hearer’s mind through moods of mild languor and sudden surprise, the lively movement of cheerfulness rising to eager joy, the burst of impetuous fury gradually subsiding to calm. We can all do this, and what is more, we do it without reference to the meaning of the words used, for emotion can be expressed and even delicately shaded off in pronouncing mere nonsense-syllables. For instance, the words of an Italian opera in England are to a great part of the audience mere nonsense-syllables serving as a means of musical and emotional expression. Clearly this kind of utterance ought to be understood by all mankind, whatever be the language they may happen to speak. It is so, for the most savage and outlandish tribes know how to make such interjections as ah! oh! express by their tone such feelings as surprise, pain, entreaty, threatening, disdain, and they understand as well as we do the growling ur-r-r! of anger, or the puh! of contempt.

The next class of sounds used as expressive signs are imitative. As a deaf-and-dumb child expresses the idea of a cat by imitating the creature’s act of washing its face, so a speaking child will indicate it by imitating its miaou. If the two children wish to show that they are thinking of a clock, the dumb one will show with his hand the swinging of the pendulum, while the speaking one will say “tick-tack.” Here again the sounds are gestures made with the voice, or sound-gestures. In this way an endless variety of objects and actions can be brought to mind by imitating their proper sounds. Not only do children delight in such vocal imitations, but they have come into ordinary language, as when people speak of the coo of the pigeon, the hee-haw of the donkey, the ding-dong of the bell, and the rat-tat of the knocker. It need hardly be said that these ways of expression are understood by mankind all the world over.

Now joining gesture-actions and gesture-sounds, they will form together what may be called a Natural Language. This natural language really exists, and in wild regions even has some practical value, as when a European traveller makes shift to converse in it with a party of Australians round their camp-fire, or with a Mongol family in their felt tent. What he has to do is to act his most expressive mimic gestures, with a running accompaniment of exclamations and imitative noises. Here then is found a natural means of intercourse, much fuller than mere pantomime of gestures only. It is a common language of all mankind, springing so directly from the human mind that it must have belonged to our race from the most remote ages and most primitive conditions in which man existed.

Here a very interesting question arises, on which every student has the means of experimenting for himself. How far are the communications of the lower animals, by their actions and sounds, like this natural language of mankind? Every one who attends to the ways of beasts and birds is sure that many of their movements and cries are not made as messages to one another, but are merely symptoms of the creature’s own state of mind; for instance, when lambs frisk in the meadow, or eager horses paw in the stable, or beasts moan when suffering severe pain. Animals do thus when not aware that any other creature is present, just as when a man in a room by himself will clench his fist in anger, or groan in pain, or laugh aloud. When gestures and cries serve as signals to other creatures, they come nearer to real signs. The lower animals as well as man do make gestures and cries which act as communications, being perceived by others, as when horses will gently bite one another to invite rubbing, or rabbits stamp on the ground and other rabbits answer, and birds and beasts plainly call one another, especially males and females at pairing-time. So distinct are the gestures and cries of animals under different circumstances, that by experience we know their meaning almost certainly. Human language does not answer its purpose more perfectly than the hen’s cluck to call her chickens, or the bellow of rage with which the bull, tossing his head, warns off a dog near his paddock. As yet, however, no observer has been able to follow the workings of mind even in the dog that jumps up for food and barks for the door to be opened. It is hard to say how far the dog’s mind merely associates jumping up with being fed, and barking with being let in, or how far it forms a conception like ours of what it is doing and why it does it. Anyhow, it is clear that the beasts and birds go so far in the natural language as to make and perceive gestures and cries as signals. But a dog’s mind seems not to go beyond this point, that a good imitation of a mew leads it to look for a cat in the room; whereas a child can soon make out from the nurse saying miaou that she means something about some cat, which need not even be near by. That is, a young child can understand what is not proved to have entered into the mind of the cleverest dog, elephant, or ape, that a sound may be used as the sign of a thought or idea. Thus, while the lower animals share with man the beginnings of the natural language, they hardly get beyond its rudiments, while the human mind easily goes on to higher stages.

In describing the natural language of gestures and exclamations, we have as yet only looked at it as used alone where more perfect language is not to be had. It has now to be noticed that fragments of it are found in the midst of ordinary language. A people may speak English, or Chinese, or Choctaw, as their mother-tongue, but nevertheless they will keep up the use of the expressive gestures and interjections and imitations which belong to natural language. Mothers and nurses use these in teaching little children to think and speak. It is needless to print examples of this nursery talk, for unless our readers’ minds have already been struck by it, they are not likely to study philology to much purpose. In the conversation of grown people, the self-expressive or natural sounds become more scanty, yet they are real and unmistakable, as the following examples will serve to show.

As for gestures, many in constant use among our own and other nations must have come down from generation to generation since primitive ages of mankind, as when the orator bows his head, or holds up a threatening hand, or thrusts from him an imaginary intruder, or points to the sky, or counts his friends or enemies on his fingers. Next, as to emotional sounds, a variety of these is actually used in every language. For instances, a few may be cited from among the interjections set down in grammars:

• English—ah! oh! ugh! foh! ha! ha! tut! (t-t) sh!
• Sanskrit—aho! (surprise), aha! (reproach), um! (vexation).
• Malay—eh! (triumph), weh! (compassion), chih! (dislike).
• Galla—o! woyo! (sorrow), mê! (entreaty).
• Australian—năh! (surprise), pooh! (contempt).

As for imitative words, all languages of mankind, ancient and modern, savage and civilized, contain more or less of them, and any English child can see how the following set of animals and instruments were named by appropriate sound:—

• Ass = eō (Egyptian).
• Crow = kâka (Sanskrit).
• Cat = mau (Chinese).
• Nightingale = bulbul (Persian).
• Hoopoe = upupa (Latin).
• Rattlesnake = shi-shi-gwa (Algonquin).
• Fly = bumberoo (Australian).
• Drum = dundu (Sanskrit).
• Flute = ulule (Galla).
• Whistle = pipit (Malay).
• Bell = kwa-lal-kwa-lal (Yakama).
• Blow-tube = pub (Quiché).
• Gun = pung (Botokudo).

Such words are always springing up afresh in dialect or slang; for instance English pop, meaning ginger-beer; German gaggele, an egg, from the cackle of the hen as she laid it; French “maître fifi,” a scavenger (as it were “master fie-fie”). In the same way many actions are expressed by appropriate sounds. Thus in the Tecuna language of Brazil the verb to sneeze is haitschu, while the Welsh for a sneeze is tis. In the Chinuk jargon, the expressive sound humm means to stink, and the drover’s kish-kish becomes a verb meaning to drive horses or cattle. It is even possible to find a whole sentence made with imitative words, for the Galla of Abyssinia, to express “the smith blows the bellows,” says, tumtun bufa bufti, much as an English child might say “the tumtum puffs the puffer.” Such words being taken direct from nature, it is to be expected that people of quite different language should sometimes hit on nearly the same imitations. Thus the Ibo language of West Africa has the word okoko for the bird we call a cock. The English verbs to pat and to bang seem to come from imitations of sound, much the same being found elsewhere; as when the Japanese say pata-pata to express the sound of flapping or clapping, and the Yoruba negros have the verb gbang, to beat.

Students whose attention is once directed to this class of self-expressive words, will notice them at a glance in each fresh language they master. It takes more careful observation to trace them when the sound has been transferred by the process of metaphor (i.e. carrying over) to some new meaning not close to the original sense, but there are plenty of clear cases to choose illustrations from. In the Chinuk jargon of the West Coast of America, a tavern is called a “heehee-house,” a term which puzzles a foreigner till he understands that among the people who speak this curious dialect the imitative word heehee signifies not only laughter but the amusement which causes it, so that the term in fact means “amusement-house.” It might seem difficult to hit upon an imitative word to denote a courtier, but the Basuto of South Africa do this perfectly; they have a word ntsi-ntsi, which means a fly, being, indeed, an imitation of its buzz, and they simply transfer this word to mean also the flattering parasite who buzzes round the chief like a fly round meat. These instances from uncivilized languages are like those which appear among the most polished nations, as when we English take the imitative verb to puff from its proper sense of blowing, to express the idea of inflated, hollow praise. Now if the pronunciation of such words becomes changed, their origin may be only recognised by old records happening to preserve their first sound. Thus when English woe is traced back to Anglo-Saxon wá, it is found to be an actual groan turned (like German weh) into a substantive expressing sorrow or distress. So an Englishman would hardly guess from the present pronunciation and meaning of the word pipe, what its origin was; yet when he compares it with the Low Latin pipa, French pipe, pronounced more like our word peep, to chirp, and meaning such a reed-pipe as shepherds played on, he then sees how cleverly the very sound of the musical pipe has been made into a word for all kinds of tubes, such as tobacco-pipes and water-pipes. Words like this travel like Indians on the war-path, wiping out their footmarks as they go. For all we know, multitudes of our ordinary words may have thus been made from real sounds, but have now lost beyond recovery the traces of their first expressiveness.

We have not yet come to the end of the intelligible ways in which sound can be made to express sense. When people want to show alteration in the meaning of a word, it is enough to make some change in its pronunciation. It is not difficult to see how, in the Wolof language of West Africa, where dagou means to walk, dâgou signifies to walk proudly; dagana means to ask humbly, but dagâna to demand. In the Mpongwe language the meaning can be actually reversed by changing the pronunciation: as “mi tonda,” I love, but “mi tonda,” I love not. The English reader can manage to do much the same tricks by varying the tones of his own verbs walk, ask, love. This process of expressing difference of sense by difference of sound may be carried much farther. An instructive instance of clear symbolism by sound is to be found in a word coined by the chemist Guyton de Morveau. In his names for chemical compounds he had already the term sulfate (made on a Latin pattern like sulphuratus), but afterwards he wanted a word to denote a sulphur-salt of different proportions, and thereupon, to express the fact that there was an alteration, he changed a vowel and made the term sulfite. He perhaps did not know that he was here resorting to a device found in many rude languages. Thus in Manchu, contrast of sound serves to indicate difference of sex, chacha meaning “male” and cheche “female,” ama “father” and eme “mother.” So distances are often expressed by altering the vowel, as in Malagasy ao means a little way off, eo still nearer, io close at hand. In this way it is easy to make sets of expressive personal pronouns; as in the Tumal language ngi “I,” ngo “thou,” ngu “he.” Another well-known process is reduplication or doubling, which serves a number of different purposes. It shows repetition or strengthening of meaning, as where the Polynesian aka “to laugh,” becomes akaaka “to laugh much,” while loa “long,” becomes lololoa “very long.” Our words haw-haw and bonbon are like these. It is also easy to form plurals by reduplication, as Malay orang “man,” orang-orang “men;” Japanese fito “man,” fito-bito “men.” Among the kinds of reduplication best known to us is that which marks tenses in verbs, like didōmi and tetupha in Greek, momordi in Latin.

These clever but intelligible devices for making the sound follow the sense, show how easily man gets beyond mere imitation. Language is one branch of the great art of sign-making or sign-choosing, and its business is to hit upon some sound as a suitable sign or symbol for each thought. Whenever a sound has been thus chosen there was no doubt a reason for the choice. But it did not follow that each language should choose the same sound. This is well shown by the peculiar class of words belonging to children’s language or baby-language, of which the word baby itself is one. These words are made up all over the world from the few simple syllables which children first utter, chosen almost anyhow to express the nursery ideas of mother, father, nurse, toy, sleep, &c. Thus while we have our way of using papa and mama, the Chilians say papa for “mother,” and the Georgians mama for “father,” while in various languages dada may mean “father,” “cousin,” “nurse;” tata “father,” “son,” “good-bye”! Such children’s words often find their way into the language of grown people, and any slight change makes them look like ordinary words. Thus in English one might hardly suspect pope and abbot of having their origin in baby-words, yet this is evident when they are traced back to Latin papa and Syriac abba, both meaning “father.”

These nursery words have already come beyond the “natural language” of self-expressive gestures and sounds. From its simple and clear facts we thus pass to the more difficult and obscure principles of “articulate language.” On examining English, or any other of the thousand tongues spoken in the world, it is found that most of the words used show no such connection between sound and sense as is so plain in the natural or self-expressive words. To illustrate the difference, when a child calls a pocket timepiece a tick-tick, this is plainly self-expressive. But when we call it a watch, this word does not show why it is used. It is known that the instrument had its name from telling the hours like a watch-man, whose name denotes his duty to watch, Anglo-Saxon wœccan, from wacan, to move, wake; but here explanation comes to a stop, for no philologist has succeeded in showing why the syllable wac came to denote this particular idea. Or if the same child call a locomotive engine a puff-puff, this is self-expressive. Grown people call it an engine, a term which came through French from Latin ingenium, which meant that which is “in-born,” thence natural ability or genius, thence an effort of genius, invention or contrivance, and thence a machine. By going farther back and taking the Latin word to pieces, it is seen that the syllables in and gen convey the ideas of “in” and “birth”; but here again etymology breaks down, for why these sounds were chosen for these meanings no one knows. Thus it is with at least nine-tenths of the words in dictionaries; there is no apparent reason why the word go should not have signified the idea of coming, and the word come the idea of going; nor can the closest examination show cause why in Hebrew chay means live, and mêth dead, or why in Maori pai means good and kino bad. It is maintained by some philologists that emotional and imitative sounds such as have been described in this chapter are the very source of all language, and that although most words now show no trace of such origin, this is because they have quite lost it in the long change of pronunciation and meaning they have gone through, so that they are now become mere symbols, which children have to learn the meaning of from their teachers. Now all this certainly has taken place, but it would be unscientific to accept it as a complete explanation of the origin of language. Besides the emotional and imitative ways, several other devices have here been shown in which man chooses sounds to express thoughts, and who knows what other causes may have helped? All we have a right to say is, that from what is known of man’s ways of choosing signs, it is likely that there was always some kind of fitness or connection which led to each particular sound being taken to express a particular thought. This seems to be the most reasonable opinion to be held as to the famous problem of the Origin of Language.

At the same time, what little is known of man’s ways of making new words out of suitable sounds, is of great importance in the study of human nature. It proves that so far as language can be traced to its actual source, that source does not lie in some lost gifts or powers of man, but in a state of mind still acting, and not above the level of children and savages. The origin of language was not an event which took place long ago once for all, and then ceased entirely. On the contrary, man still possesses, and uses when he wants it, the faculty of making new original words by choosing fit and proper sounds. But he now seldom puts this faculty to serious use, for this good reason, that whatever language he speaks has its stock of words ready to furnish an expression for almost every fresh thought that crosses his mind.

CHAPTER V.
LANGUAGE—(continued).

Articulate Speech, [130]—Growth of Meanings, [131]—Abstract Words, [135]—Real and Grammatical Words, [136]—Parts of Speech, [138]—Sentences, [139]—Analytic Language, [139]—Word Combination, [140]—Synthetic Language, [141]—Affixes, [142]—Sound-change, [143]—Roots, [144]—Syntax, [146]—Government and Concord, [147]—Gender, [149]—Development of Language, [150].

A sentence being made up of its connected sounds as a limb is made up of its joints, we call language articulate or “jointed,” to distinguish it from the inarticulate or “unjointed” sounds uttered by the lower animals. Such conversation by gestures and exclamations as was shown in the last chapter to be a natural language common to mankind, is half-way between the communications of animals and full human speech. Every people, even the smallest and most savage tribe, has an articulate language, carried on by a whole system of sounds and meanings, which serves the speaker as a sort of catalogue of the contents of the world he lives in, taking in every subject he thinks about, and enabling him to say what he thinks about it. What a complicated and ingenious apparatus a language may be, the Greek and Latin grammars sufficiently show. Yet the more carefully such difficult languages are looked into, the more plainly it is seen that they grew up out of earlier and simpler kinds of speech. It is not our business here to make a systematic survey of the structure of languages, such as will be found in the treatises of Max Müller, Sayce, Whitney, and Peile. What we have to attend to, is that many of the processes by which languages have been built up are still to be found at work among men, and that grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules framed by grammarians, but the result of man’s efforts to get easier, fuller, and exacter expression for his thoughts. It may be noticed that our examples are oftener taken from English than from any other tongue. The reason of this is not merely the convenience of using the most familiar words as instances, but that English is of all existing languages perhaps the best for explaining the development of language in general. While its words may in great part be traced to high antiquity, its structure has passed through extreme changes in coming down to modern times, and in its present state the language at once keeps up relics of ancient formations, and has the freest growth actually going on. Thus, in one way or another, English has something to show in illustration of three out of four of the processes known to have helped in the making of language, at any time and anywhere.

As in the course of ages man’s knowledge became wider and his civilization more complex, his language had to keep up with them. Comparatively few and plain expressions had sufficed for his early rude condition, but now more and more terms had to be added for the new notions, implements, arts, offices, and relations of more highly organized society. Etymology shows how such new words are made by altering and combining old ones, carrying on old words from the old state of things to do duty in the new, shifting their meanings, and finding in any new thought some resemblance to an old one that would serve to give it a name. English is full of traces of these ways of word-making and word-shifting. For instance, that spacious stone building is still called, as its rough predecessors were, a barrack (that is, hut); in it a regiment (that is, a ruling or command) of soldiers (that is, paid men) of the infantry (that is, lads, who fought on foot) are being inspected (that is, looked into); each company (that is, those who have bread together) being under a captain (that is, headman) and his lieutenants (that is, place-holders). On the front of the building is a clock, a machine which keeps on its old name, meaning a bell, from the ages when its predecessor was only a bell on which a watchman struck the hours; in later times were added the weights, lumps of metal so-called from the weights of the balance, the pendulum (or hanger), and what are metaphorically called the face and hands, for showing on a scale (or ladder) the hours (or times), divided into minutes (or smalls), and then again into seconds (or followings). These instances are intentionally not drawn from the depths of etymology, but are taken to show the ordinary ways in which language finds means to supply the new terms of advancing society. It will be worth while to give a few cases showing that the languages of less civilized races do their duty in much the same ways. The Aztecs called a boat a “water-house” (acalli), and thence the censer in which they burnt copal as incense came to be called a “little copal-boat” (copalacaltontli). The Vancouver Islanders, when they saw how a screw-steamer went, named it at once yetseh-yetsokleh, that is, the “kick-kicker.” The Hidatsas of the Missouri till lately had only hard stone for their arrows and hatchets; so when they became acquainted with iron and copper they made names for these metals—uetsasipisa and uetsahisisi, that is to say, “stone black” and “stone red,” The horse, when brought by the white men among peoples who had never seen it, had to be named, and accordingly the Tahitians called it “pig-carry-man,” while the Sioux Indians said it was a “magic-dog.”

As a help to understand how words have come to express still more difficult thoughts, it is well to remember the contrast between the gesture-language and spoken English ([p. 119]). It was seen how the deaf-and-dumb fall short of our power of expressing general and abstract ideas. Not that they cannot conceive such ideas at all. They use signs as general terms when they can lay hold of some quality or action as the mark of a whole class. Thus flapping one’s arms like wings means any bird, or birds in general, and the sign of legs-four, means beasts, or quadrupeds in general. The pretence of pouring something out of a jug expresses the notion of fluid, which they understand, as we do, to comprise water, tea, quicksilver; and they probably have, though more dimly than we, such other abstract notions as the whiteness common to all white things, and the length, breadth, and thickness which all solid objects have. But while the deaf-mute’s sign must always make us think of the very thing it imitates, the spoken word can shift its meaning so as to follow thought wherever it goes. It is instructive to look at words in this light, to see how, starting from thoughts as plain as those shown by the signs of the American savage, they can come on to the most difficult terms of the lawyer, the mathematician, and the philosopher. To us words have become, as Lord Bacon said, counters for notions. By means of words we are enabled to deal with abstract ideas, got by comparing a number of thoughts, but so as only to attend to what they have in common. The reader of this no doubt uses easily, and perhaps correctly, such words as sort, kind, thing, cause, to make, be, do, suffer. If he will try to get clear to his mind what is actually meant by these words, that is, what sense they carry with them wherever used, he may teach himself the best lesson he ever learnt, either in language or philosophy. To Englishmen who know no language but their own, these words are indeed, as it were, counters, chosen at random to express thoughts. Having learnt by practice how and where to apply them, they are seldom even conscious of their highly abstract nature. The philologist cannot trace the complete history of them all, but he knows enough to satisfy him that they came out of words easier to understand. As in the Bornu language of Africa, tando, to “weave,” has become a general verb to “make,” and in Hebrew bârâ, to “cut” or “hew,” has come to be used for the making of the heavens and earth; so our word to make may have meant originally to fit, or join. The English word sort comes from Latin sors, a “lot,” through such a set of meanings as allotment, oracle, fate, condition, chance, portion; kind meant of one kindred or descent; to be may have meant to grow; to suffer meant to bear as a burden. It belongs to high metaphysics to talk of the apprehension of ideas; but these now abstruse words originally meant “catching hold” of “sights.” One use of etymology is that it teaches how men thus contrived, from words which expressed plain and easy thoughts, to make terms for more complex and abstruse thoughts. This is the high road along which the human mind has travelled from ignorance to knowledge.

The next contrivance of language to be noticed is the use of “grammatical” words, which serve to connect the “real” words and show what they have to do with one another. This again is well seen by looking at the gesture-language ([p. 119]). If a deaf-and-dumb man wants to convey in gestures “John is come, he has brought the harness of the pony and put it on a bench,” he can communicate the sense of this well enough, but he does it by merely giving the real parts, as “John, harness, pony, carry, bench, put.” But the articles “a” and “the,” the preposition “of,” the conjunction “and,” the substantive verb “is,” and the pronouns “he,” “it,” are grammatical devices which have not signs in his natural system, and which he does not even learn the meaning of till he is taught to read. Nevertheless, the deaf-mute, if obliged to be very exact in his account, can actually give us a good idea of the way in which we speaking-people have come to use grammatical words. Though he cannot intimate that it is a bench, he can hold up one finger to show that it is one bench; though he has no sign for the pony, he can as it were point it out so as to show it is that pony; instead of expressing of the pony as we do, he can go farther by pretending to take the harness off the pony. Now English etymology often shows that our grammatical words were made in very much this way out of real words; an or a was originally the numeral “one,” still Scotch ane; the is of the same family of words with that and there; of is derived from the same source with off; the conjunction and may be traced back to the more real meaning of “further” or “thereto”; the verb to have has become a mere auxiliary in “I have come,” yet it keeps its old full sense of to hold or grasp, when one man seizing another cries “I have him!” When an Englishman says he “stands corrected,” this does not mean that he is on his legs, but the verb has sunk into a grammatical auxiliary, now conveying little more than the passive sense he “is corrected.” It is curious to notice pronouns being thus formed from more real words. As the deaf-mute simply points with his finger to express “I” and “thou,” so the Greenlander’s uvanga = “I,” ivdlit = “thou,” are plainly derived from uv = “here,” iv = “there.” Quite a different device appears in Malay, where âmba = “slave” is used as a pronoun “I,” and tuwan = “lord” as a pronoun “thou.” How this came to pass is plainly shown by Hebrew, in such phrases as are translated in the English Bible, “thy servant saith,” “my lord knoweth;” these terms are on the road to become mere personal pronouns meaning “I” and “thou,” as in the Malay they actually have done. An exact line cannot be drawn between real and grammatical words in English or any other language, for the good reason that words pass so gradually from the real into the grammatical stage, that the same word may be used in both ways. But though the distinction is not an exact one, it should be noticed attentively. Any one who will try to tell an intelligible story in English real words only, without the help of the grammatical particles which are the links and hinges of the sentence, will see how the use of grammatical words was one of the greatest moves made by man in the formation of articulate speech.

Philology goes still further in explaining how the complicated devices of grammar arose from simple beginnings. The distinction of “parts of speech,” familiar to us in a highly-developed state from the Greek and Latin grammars, is a useful means of showing the relations among the several thoughts talked of in the sentence. But it is possible to do without parts of speech, and it is not to be supposed that they existed in the earliest forms of language. In the gesture language it has been already noticed that there is no such distinction even between noun and verb. In classical Chinese, thwan means round, a ball, to make round, to sit round, and so on; ngan means quiet, quietly, to quiet, to be quiet, &c. We English can quite enter into this, for our language has so far dropped the ancient inflexions as to break up distinctions between parts of speech in almost Chinese fashion, using a word either as substantive, adjective, or verb, as the people’s quiet, a quiet people, to quiet the people, and without scruple turning a verb into a substantive, as a workmen’s strike, or a substantive into a verb, as to horse a coach. The very formation of new parts of speech may be seen going on, as where Chinese shows how prepositions may be made out of nouns or verbs. Thus “kuo chung,” that is “kingdom middle,” is used to mean “in the kingdom,” and “sha jin i thing,” that is, “kill man use stick,” expresses “to kill a man with a stick.” So an African language, the Mandingo, may be caught in the act of making prepositions out of the nouns kang, “neck,” and kono, “belly,” when they say “put table neck” for “on the table,” and “house belly” for “in the house.”

We have next to look at the way in which language grows by combining its words to form new ones. To see this, words have to be noticed not as they stand by themselves, but as they come together in actual speaking. Language consists of sentences, and a sentence is made up of words, each word being a distinct spoken sound carrying a distinct meaning. The simplest notion of a sentence may be had from such a language as Chinese, where it can be taken apart into words which are each a single syllable. Thus kou chi shi jin sse, that is “dog sow eat man food” means that dogs and sows eat the food of men. The class of languages which can be taken to pieces in this perfect way are called analytic or isolating. In most languages of the world, however, which are more or less synthetic or compounding, the tendency is not so strong to keep words separate, and they are apt to attach themselves together. To bring clearly before our minds how the joining or compounding of words takes place, let us notice rather more closely than usual one of our English sentences. On listening, it will appear that the spoken words have not really breaks between them as in writing, but the syllables run on continuously till the speaker pauses, and what marks a word is, not its being really separated, but its having an emphasis, or stress (as it is called by Mr. Sweet). Now, from time to time, certain words may be noticed becoming actually fixed together. How this joining gradually takes place we sometimes try to show by writing them differently, as hard ware, hard-ware, hardware; or steam ship, steam-ship, steamship. On listening to such joined words, it is found that one of the two has lost its stress, the whole compound having now but one stress. This is how in talking English our minds give a sign by our voices that two words have become one. The next step is when the sound of one of the part-words becomes slurred or broken down, as in the end-words of waterman, wrongful. Or both the simple words may have broken down, as in boatswain and coxswain, where writing keeps up the original meaning of the swain in charge of the boat or cock-boat, but in actual speaking the words have shrunk to what may be spelt bōsun, coxun. Now this process of forming a new word by (so to speak) welding together two or more old ones, is one of the chief acts by which word-makers, ancient and modern, have furnished themselves with more manageable terms, which again as the meanings of the separate parts were less cared for, were cut shorter in speaking. When this has not gone too far, philologists can still get back to the original elements of such words, discerning the fourteen night in fortnight; the unus and decem in undecim, shrunk still farther in French onze; the jus, dico, in Latin judex, which in English comes down to judge.

As examples how word-compounding goes on in unfamiliar tongues, may be taken the Malay term for “arrow,” which is anak-panah, or “child-(of-the)-bow;” and the native Australian term for “unanimous,” which is gurdugynyul, or “heart-one-come.” To show how such compound words become shortened, take the Mandingo word for “sister,” inbadingmuso, which is made up of mi bado dingo muso, meaning “my-mother-child-female.” The natives of Vancouver’s Island gave to a certain long-bearded Englishman the name Yakpus; this appears to have come from yakhpekukselkous, made up of words signifying “long-face-hair-man,” which in speaking had been cut down to yakpus. No one who did not happen to be told the history of this word could ever have guessed it. This is an important lesson in the science of language, for it is likely that tens of thousands of words in the languages of the world may have come into the state in which we find them by the shortening of long compound words, and when this has been done recklessly as in the last example, and the history lost, all reasonable hope is gone of ever getting back to the original form and meaning. Nor does this process of contraction affect only compound words, but it may act on a whole sentence, fusing it as it were into one word. Here the synthetic or compounding principle reaches its height. As a contrast to the analytic Chinese sentence given at page 139, to show the perfect distinctness of their words, we may take a sentence of an African language to show how utterly that distinctness may be lost. When a Grebo negro wishes to express that he is very angry, he says in his metaphorical way “it has raised a bone in my breast.” His full words for expressing this would be e ya mu kra wudi, but in speaking he runs them together so that what he actually utters is yamukroure. Where such breaking down has gone on unchecked, it is easy to see how the language of a barbaric tribe may alter so much in a few generations as hardly to be recognised. Indeed, any one who will attend to how English words run together in talking may satisfy himself that his own language would undergo rapid changes like those of barbaric tongues, were it not for the schoolmaster and the printer, who insist on keeping our words fixed and separate.

The few examples here given of new words made by compounding old ones may serve to illustrate the great principle that such combination, far from being a mere source of confusion, has been one of the great means of building up language. Especially, one of the great discoveries in modern philology is how grammatical formation and inflexion has partly come about by a kind of word-compounding. It must have seemed to the old scholars a mysterious and arbitrary proceeding that Latin should have fixed upon a set of meaningless affixes to inflect and make into different parts of speech ago, agis, agit, agere, agens, actum, actor, actio, activus, activè, &c. But the mystery to some extent disappeared when it was noticed how in modern languages the running together of words produced something of the kind. Thus the hood of womanhood, priesthood, which is now a mere grammatical suffix, was in old English a word of itself, hâd, meaning form, order, state; and the suffix -ly was once the distinct word “like,” as is seen by Anglo-Saxon saying cwên-lic, “queen-like,” where modern English says queenly. In Chaucer’s English it is seen how the pronoun thou had dwindled into a mere verb-ending,

“He pokyd Johan, and seyde, Slepistow?

Herdistow ever slik a sang er now?”

In English the future tense of the verb to give is “I will give,” or, colloquially, “I’ll give.” Here writing separates what speaking joins, but the modern French future tense donnerai, donneras, is the verb donner with the auxiliary verb ai, as, both spoken and written on to it, so that “je donnerai” is a phrase like “I have to give.” The plural donnerons, donnerez, can no longer be thus taken to pieces, for the remains of the auxiliary verb have passed into meaningless grammatical affixes ons, ez. There is reason to suppose that many of the affixes of Greek and Latin grammar arose in this way by distinct words combining together and then shrinking. Not that it would be safe to assert that all affixes came into existence in this particular way. As was pointed out in the last chapter, men wanting to utter a thought are clever enough to catch up in very far-fetched ways a sound to express it. Thus the prefix ge, which German uses to make past participles with, seems to have originally signified “with” or “together,” which sense it still retains in such words as gespiele, “playfellow;” but by a curious shifting of purpose it came to serve as a means of forming participles, as spielen, to play, gespielt, played. It was so used also in Anglo-Saxon, as clypian, to call, geclypod, called, which word in its later form yclept still keeps up among us a trace of the old grammatical device. Philologists have to keep their eyes open to this power which language-makers have of using sounds for some new purpose they were not intended for. Thus, in English, the change of vowels in foot, feet, and in find, found, now serves as a means of declining the noun and conjugating the verb. But history happens to show that the vowel change was not originally made with this intention at all. The Anglo-Saxon declension proves that the vowel was not then a sign of number in the noun; it was singular fôt, fôtes, fêt, plural fêt, fôta, fôtum. Nor was it a sign of tense in the Anglo-Saxon verb, where the perfect of findan, to find, had different vowels in its singular, ic fand, I found, and its plural, we fundon, we found. It was the later Englishmen who, knowing nothing of the real reasons which brought about the variation of the vowels, took to using them to mark singular from plural, and present from perfect.

It is the work of grammarians in examining any language to take all its combined words to pieces as far as possible. Greek and Latin grammars now teach how to analyze words by stripping off their affixes, so as to get down to the real part or root, which is generally a simple sound expressing a simple notion. A root is best understood by considering it to have been once a separate word, as it would be in such a language as English. Even in languages where the roots seldom appear without some affix attached, they may stand by themselves as imperative, like Latin dic! say! Turkish sev! love! But in many languages roots can only be found as imaginary forms, by comparing a group of words and getting at the common part belonging to them all. Thus in Latin it appears from gnosco, gnotus, &c., that there must be a root gno which carries the thought of knowing. Going on to Greek, there is found in gignōskō, gnōsis, gnōmē, &c., the same root gno with the same meaning. Turning next to Sanskrit, a similar sound, jnâ, appears as the root-form for knowing. In this way, by comparing the whole set of Aryan or Indo-European languages, it appears that there must have been in ancient times a word something like gna, meaning to know, which is to be traced not only in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, but in many other languages of the family, as Russian znat, English know. A few more such Aryan roots, which the reader recognises at once in well-known languages, are sta, to stand, sad, to sit, ga, to go, i, to go, ma, to measure, da, to give, vid, to see, rag, to rule, mar to die. These simple sounds seem to have already become fixed to carry their meanings in the remote ages when the ancestors of the Aryan peoples wandered with their herds on the highlands of Central Asia. It is not needful to tell the student of anthropology how interesting it is to arrive thus at the earliest known root-words of any family. But it should at the same time be noticed that even in the earliest of these sets of roots, we seldom come to anything like an actual origin or beginning. Some few may indeed have been taken direct from the natural language, for instance ru, to roar, and if this was so here is a real origin. But most roots, to whatever languages of the world they may belong, are like the group given above, where it is impossible to say confidently how their sound came to express their meaning. Unless this can be done, it is safest not to take such roots as really primitive formations, for they may have a long lost history of the utmost change. How this may happen, our own language has a useful lesson to teach. Imagine one who knows no language but English trying to get at its roots. To him the verb to roll might seem a root-word, a primitive element of language; indeed it actually has been fancied a natural sound imitating the act of rolling. Yet any philologist would tell him that English roll is a comparatively modern form, which came through a long series of earlier stages; it was borrowed from French rolle, roller, now rôle, rouler, all from Latin rotulus, diminutive of rota, a wheel, even this coming from a more ancient verb and signifying a runner or goer. Still more adventurous is the history of another English word which has now all the parts of a verb, to check, checking, checked, besides such forms as a check in one’s course, the check-string to stop the coachman, the check-valve to stop the water in a pipe. This word check has all the simplicity of sound and sense which might belong to an original root-word. Yet strange to say, it is really the Persian word shah, meaning “king,” which came to Europe with the game of chess as the word of challenge to the king, and thence by a curious metaphor passed into a general word for stopping anybody or anything. For all that is known, many root-words among the Greeks or Jews, or even the simple-looking monosyllables of the Chinese, may during præhistoric ages have travelled as far from their real origin as these English verbs. Thus the roots from which language grows may often be themselves sprung as it were from yet earlier seeds or cuttings, grown at home or imported from abroad, and though in our time words mostly come from the ancient roots, the power of striking new roots is not yet dead.

Having now, in such a broad way as suits the present purpose, looked at the formation of words, something may be said as to how language contrives to show the relations among the words of a sentence. This is done by what grammarians call syntax, concord, and government. It has been seen ([p. 119]) that the gesture-language, though wanting in grammatical forms, has a strongly marked syntax. The deaf-mute’s signs must follow one another in proper order, otherwise they may convey a wrong meaning or seem nonsense. So, in spoken languages which do not inflect their words, such as the Chinese, syntax is the main part of grammar; thus li ping = sharp weapons, ping li = weapons (are) sharp; chi kuo = to govern the kingdom, but kuo chi = the kingdom is governed. This seems quite natural to us, for modern English has come far towards the Chinese plan of making the sense of the sentence depend on the order of the words, thus marking the difference between rank of families and families of rank, or between men kill lions and lions kill men. In Latin it is very different, where words can be put about with such freedom, that the English reader may be hardly able to make sense of one of Tacitus’ sentences without fresh sorting the words into some order he can think them in. Especially in Latin verses there is often hardly more syntax than if the words were nonsense-syllables arranged only to scan. The sense has to be made out from the grammatical inflections, as where it is seen that in “vile potabis modicis Sabinum cantharis,” the cheapness has to do with the wine and the smallness with the mugs. It is because so many of the inflections have disappeared from English, that the English translation has to obtain a proper understanding by stricter order of words. Where the meaning of sentences depends on order or syntax, that order must be followed, but it must be borne in mind that this order differs in different languages. For a single instance, in Malay, where orang = man and utan = forest, savages and apes are called orang utan, which is just opposite to the English construction “forest man.”

Every one who can construe Greek and Latin sees what real service is done by government and agreement in showing how the words of a sentence hang together, what quality is stated of what thing, or who is asserted to act on what. But even Greek and Latin have changed so much from their earlier state, that they often fail to show the scholar clearly what they mean to do, and why. It is useful to make acquaintance with the languages of ruder nations, which show government and agreement in earlier and plainer stages of growth. One great object of grammatical construction is to make it quite clear which of two nouns concerned is subject and which object, for instance, whether it was a chief who killed a bear, or a bear who killed a chief. A particle properly attached will do this, as when the Algonquin Indians put on the syllable un both to noun and verb, in a way which we may try to translate by the pronoun him, thus:—

This gives a notion of the natural manner in which grammatical government may have come into use to mark the parts of the sentence. At the same time, it shows that different languages may go different ways to work, for here the verb and object agree together, and the subject (so to speak) governs both, which is quite unlike our familiar rule of the verb agreeing with the nominative or subject. To see the working of concord or agreement in a far clearer and completer form than Latin can show it, we may look at the Hottentot language, where a sentence may run somewhat thus, “That woman-she, our tribe’s-she, rich-being-she, another village-in-dwelling-she, praise-we-do cattle-of-she, she-does present-us two calves-of-she-from.” Here the pronoun running through the whole sentence makes it clear to the dullest hearer that it is the woman who is rich, who dwells in another village, whose cattle are praised, and who gives two of her calves. The terminations in a Greek or Latin sentence, which show the agreement of substantive and adjective with their proper verb, are remains of affixes which may have once carried their signification as plainly as they still do in the language of the Hottentots. A different plan of concord, but even more instructive to the classical scholar, appears in the Zulu language, which divides things into classes, and then carries the marking syllable of the class right through the sentence, so as to connect all the words it is attached to. Thus “u-bu-kosi b-etu o-bu-kulu bu-ya-bonakala si-bu-tanda,” means “our great kingdom appears, we love it.” Here bu, the mark of the class to which kingdom belongs, is repeated through every word referring to it. To give an idea how this acts in holding the sentence together, Dr. Bleek translates it by repeating the dom of kingdom in a similar way; “the king-dom, our dom, which dom is the great dom, the dom appears, we love the dom.” This is clumsy, but it answers the great purpose of speech, that of making one’s meaning certain beyond mistake. So, by using different class-syllables for singular and plural, and carrying them on through the whole sentence, the Zulu shows the agreement in number more plainly than Greek or Latin can do. But the Zulu language does not recognise by its class-syllables what we call gender. It is in fact one of the puzzles of philology, what can have led the speaker of Aryan languages like Greek, or Semitic languages like Hebrew, to classify things and thoughts by sex so unreasonably as they do. For Latin examples, take the following groups: pes (masc.), manus (fem.), brachium (neut.); amor (masc.), virtus (fem.), delictum (neut.). German shows gender in as practically absurd a state, as witness der Hund, die Ratte; das Thier, die Pflanze. In Anglo-Saxon, wîf (English wife), was neuter, while wîf-man (i.e. “wife-man,” English woman) was masculine. Modern English, in discarding an old system of grammatical gender that had come to be worse than useless, has set an example which French and German might do well to follow. Yet it must be borne in mind that the devices of language, though they may decay into absurdity, were never originally absurd. No doubt the gender-system of the classic languages is the remains of an older and more consistent plan. There are languages outside our classical education which show that gender (that is genus, kind, class,) is by no means necessarily according to sex. Thus in the Algonquin languages of North America, and the Dravidian languages of South India, things are divided not as male or female, but as alive or dead, rational or irrational, and put accordingly in the animate or major gender, or in the inanimate or minor gender. Having noticed how the Zulu concord does its work by regularly repeating the class-sign, we seem to understand how in the Aryan languages the signs of number and gender may have come to be used as a similar means of carrying through the sentence the information that this substantive belongs to that adjective and that verb. Yet even in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic, such concord falls short of the fulness and clearness it has among the barbarians of Africa, while in the languages of modern Europe, especially our own, it has mostly disappeared, probably because with the advance of intelligence it was no longer found necessary.

The facts in this chapter will have given the reader some idea how man has been and still is at work building up language. Any one who began by studying the grammars of such languages as Greek or Arabic, or even of such barbarous tongues as Zulu or Eskimo, would think them wonderfully artificial systems. Indeed, had one of these languages suddenly come into existence among a tribe of men, this would have been an event mysterious and unaccountable in the highest degree. But when one begins at the other end, by noticing the steps by which word-making and composition, declension and conjugation, concord and syntax, arise from the simplest and rudest beginnings, then the formation of language is seen to be reasonable, purposeful, and intelligible. It was shown in the last chapter that man still possesses the faculty of bringing into use fresh sounds to express thoughts, and now it may be added that he still possesses the faculty of framing these sounds into full articulate speech. Thus every human tribe has the capabilities which, had they not inherited a language ready-made from their parents, would have enabled them to make a new language of their own.

CHAPTER VI.
LANGUAGE AND RACE.

Adoption and loss of Language, [152]—Ancestral Language, [153]—Families of Language, [155]—Aryan, [156]—Semitic, [159]—Egyptian, Berber, &c. [160]—Tatar or Turanian, [161]—South-East Asian, [162]—Malayo-Polynesian, [163]—Dravidian, [164]—African, Bantu, Hottentot, [164]—American, [165]—Early Languages and Races, [165].

The next question is, What can be learnt from languages as to the history of the nations speaking them, and the races these nations belong to?

In former chapters, in dividing mankind into stocks or races according to their skulls, complexions, and other bodily characters, language was not taken into account as a mark of race. In fact, a man’s language is no full and certain proof of his parentage. There are even cases in which it is totally misleading, as when some of us have seen persons whose language is English, but their faces Chinese or African, and who, on inquiry, are found to have been brought away in infancy from their native countries. It is within every one’s experience how one parent language disappears in intermarriage, as where persons called Boileau or Muller may be now absolutely English as to language, in spite of their French or German ancestry. Now not only individuals but whole populations may have their native languages thus lost or absorbed. The negroes shipped as slaves to America were taken from many tribes and had no native tongue in common, so that they came to talk to one another in the language of their white masters, and there is now to be seen the curious spectacle of black woolly-haired families talking broken-down dialects of English, French, or Spanish. In our own country the Keltic language of the Ancient Britons has not long since fallen out of use in Cornwall, as in time it will in Wales. But whether the Keltic language is spoken or not, the Keltic blood remains in the mixed population of Cornwall, and to class the modern Cornishmen as of pure English race because they speak English, would be to misuse the evidence of language. Much bad anthropology has been made by thus carelessly taking language and race as though they went always and exactly together. Yet they do go together to a great extent. Although what a man’s language really proves is not his parentage but his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although migration and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time, so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important part. Thus in Cornwall the English tongue is a real record of the settlement of the English there, though it fails to tell of the Keltic race who were in the land before them, and with whom they mixed. In a word, the information which the language of a nation gives as to its race is something like what a man’s surname tells as to his family, by no means the whole history, but one great line of it.

It has next to be seen what the languages of the world can show as to the early history of nations. Great care has to be taken with the proofs of connexion between languages. It is of little use to compare two languages as old-fashioned philologists were too apt to do when, if they found half-a-dozen words at all similar, they took these without more ado to be remnants of one primitive tongue, the origin of both. In the more careful philological comparisons of the present day many similarities of words have to be thrown aside as not proving connexion at all. In any two languages a few words are sure to be similar by mere accident, as where, in the Society Islands, tiputa means a cloak, like tippet with us. Words must only be compared when there is a real correspondence of meaning as well as sound, or the way would be opened for fancies like that of a writer who connects the well known Polynesian word tabu, sacred, with tabut, the Arabic name of the ark of the covenant, apparently because that was a very sacred object. Also, words imitated from nature prove nothing in this way, as where the Hindus and the savages of Vancouver’s Island both call a crow kaka, this being not because their languages are connected, but because it is the bird’s cry. What is most important of all is to make sure that the words compared really belong to the old stock of the language they are found in. Before now a writer has proved to his own satisfaction that Turkish, Arabic, and Persian are all branches of one primitive language, his argument being that the Turks call a man adam, as the Arabs call the first man, and a father pader, which is like the Persian word. The fact is true enough, but what the argument omits to notice is that the Turks have been for ages enriching their own barbaric language by taking words from the cultured Arabic and Persian, and adam and pader are such lately borrowed words, not philologically Turkish at all. Borrowed words like these are indeed valuable evidence, but what they prove is not the common origin of languages, it is intercourse between the nations speaking them. They often give the clue to the country from which some new produce was obtained, or some new instrument, or idea, or institution, was learnt. Thus in English it is seen by the very words how Italy furnished us with opera, sonata, chiaroscuro, while Spain gave gallina and mulatto, how from the Hebrews we have sabbath and jubilee, from the Arabs zero and magazine, while Mexico has supplied chocolate and tomato, Haiti hammock and hurricane, Peru guano and quinine, and even the languages of the South Sea Islands are represented by taboo and tatoo. But in all this there is not one particle of evidence that any one of these languages is sprung from the same family with any other.

When two languages have such a common descent, the philologist is not content to ascertain it by merely looking for a few words of similar sound. Indeed he expects to find that the words of the ancestral language will not only have changed in its descendant languages, but that they will often have changed according to different rules. Thus he knows that according to the rule called Grimm’s law, the English ten, tame, should appear in German with a different initial, zehn, zahm, while again these should be represented in Latin by decem, domare. With the same regularity of change, the sound which in some of the Polynesian languages is k, in others has become t; thus the word man, in the Sandwich Islands kanaka (whence our sailors call any South Sea Islander a kanaker), appears in New Zealand under the form of tangata. Going beyond the sound of words into their structure, the comparative philologist reckons that when two languages are allied, they ought to show such similarity in the roots and in the putting together, that neither chance nor borrowing can account for the resemblance. In the first chapter, for another purpose, examples were given of languages continuing to show their intimate connexion while diverging from their parent tongues. The reader may find it worth while to look back to these illustrations ([p. 8]) before going on to the following sketch of the families of language belonging to the various races of man.

The languages of white men mostly belong to two great families, the Aryan and Semitic. First as to the Aryan family, called also Indo-European, which takes in the languages of part of South and West Asia, and almost the whole of Europe. The original tongue whence these are all descended may be called the Primitive Aryan. What the roots of this ancient language were like, and how they were put together into words, the student may gain an idea from Greek and Latin, but a still better from Sanskrit, where both roots and inflexions have been kept up in a more perfect and regular state. As a rough illustration of the way in which words of our familiar European languages may be discerned in Sanskrit, one line of the first hymn of the Veda is here given, where the worshippers entreat Agni, the divine Fire, that he will be approachable to us as a father to a son, and will be near for our happiness:

Sa nah pitâ-iva sûnave Agne su-upâyanah bhava: sachasva nah svastaye.

Here may be more or less clearly made out words connected with Latin, Greek, and English nos, pater, son, ignis, up, be, sequi, cuestō, and others. Though the original Aryan is a lost language, philologists try to reconstruct it by comparing its oldest and most perfect descendants, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Russian, Gothic, Old Irish, &c. Granting that a primitive Aryan tongue once existed, there must once have been a nation who spoke it, and whose descendants carried it down to later ages. It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see [page 109]), for in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. As India and Persia have preserved in their sacred languages the Aryan tongue less changed than elsewhere, it may be judged that the land whence the invading Aryans came was not far off. But it may have been further east in Central Asia, or further west on the Russian plains. In this home-land, wherever it may have been, the Aryans lived in barbaric but not savage clans, tilling the soil and grazing their flocks and herds, workers in metal and skilled in many arts of life, a warlike folk who went forth to fight in chariots, a people able to govern and obey, to make laws and abide by them, a religious people earnest in the worship of the sun, and sky, and fire, and waters, and with pious faith in the divine spirits of their ancestors. Carrying with them their language, laws, and religion, these nation-founders spread in radiating tracks of migration over South-West Asia and all Europe. Where they went they found the land peopled by Dravidians, Tatars, and doubtless many other stocks once spread far and wide, like the Basques, whose language still lingers in the Pyrenees. Where the old languages have vanished, the record of the early populations of Europe is only to be had from their tombs, and seen in the features of the present nations, which may be often more those of the original people than of the Aryan invaders. The earliest Aryan hordes who started on their westward migration may have been the ancestors of the Keltic nations, for their language has undergone most change, and they are found in the far west of Europe, as though they had been pressed on by the Teuton-Scandinavian tribes who followed them, distant kinsfolk but not friends. The ancestors of the Græco-Italian nations migrated westward till they reached the Mediterranean, and last came the Slavonic peoples who now occupy Eastern Europe. Thus much of the beginnings of the Aryan nations may be learnt from their languages and their places on the map. It is not in the earliest ages of history that they appear on the world-stage where Egyptians and Babylonians had long played the great parts. The Aryans become prominent within a thousand years before the Christian era, when in India there arises among them the religion of Buddha, now reckoned the most numerous in the world; when the Medes and Persians come into power, and Cyrus appears with his conquering host; when the Greeks bring their wondrous intellect to bear on art, science, and philosophy; and the Romans set up the military and legal system which gave them their empire. In later ages our Teutonic nations, who made their first appearance as the ravagers of culture, come to be its promoters. The Aryan nations have kept up in the modern world the career of conquest and the union with other peoples which they began in præhistoric ages. Outside the world known to the ancients, Aryan languages are now spoken on far continents and islands, whether the men who speak them are white colonists from Europe, who have slain or driven out the old dwellers on the soil, or whether they have become blended with the native nations as in Mexico and Peru.

To proceed now to the languages of the next family, the Semitic, an idea of these can be most easily gained from Hebrew. Any student seriously bent on the science of language should learn at least enough Hebrew to spell out a few chapters of Genesis, for all the other languages commonly taught in England being of the Aryan family, this will serve to bring his mind out of that groove, by familiarizing him with speech of a different material. A very moderate number of roots, mostly of three consonants, by altering their internal vowels and changing their affixes, are made to form the greater part of the language so regularly that Hebrew dictionaries are arranged throughout by the roots. Thus from the root m-l-ch are derived verb and noun forms with the sense of reigning, as mâlach = he reigned, mâlchû = they reigned, yimloch = he shall reign, timloch = thou shalt reign, melech = king (familiar in the name of Melchi-zedek, “king of righteousness”), melâchim = kings, malchenû = our king, malchâh = queen; mamlâchâh = kingdom, and so on. The principal languages belonging to the Semitic family are the Assyrian, Hebrew and Phœnician, Syrian, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Assyrian of the Nineveh inscriptions and the Arabic spoken by the desert Beduins between them best represent the original language they are all descended from. The ancient or modern peoples speaking Semitic tongues belong mainly to the dark-white race, the type in which they agree being now most plainly seen in the Jewish countenance, with its aquiline nose, full lips, and curly black hair. Yet by features alone it would not have been possible to distinguish the Jews, Assyrians, and Arabs, among the mass of dark-white nations. Here is seen the value of language, which comes in to show that a certain group of nations are connected by common ancestry from an ancient people, who spoke the lost tongue whence Arabic and Hebrew are offshoots, and who in the ages when history begins were dwelling in South-West Asia, and sending forth their migrating tribes to found new nations, whose acts in the world form one of the great chapters of history. The conquering Assyrians took up and carried on the older Chaldæan civilisation. The Phœnicians became the great merchants of the old world, with trading colonies along the Mediterranean and commerce in the far East, nor was it only stuffs and spices that they carried, but they spread arts and thoughts into new regions, and in their hands the clumsy hieroglyphic writing became the alphabet. The Israelites, though as a nation they never reached such power or culture, made their conquests in the world of religion, and while the crowd of deities worshipped in Assyrian and Phœnician temples vanished away, the worship of Jehovah passed on into Christianity, and overspread the world. Latest, the warrior-tribes of Arabia carried the banner of their prophet among the nations around, and founded the faith of Islam, a civilizing power in the middle ages, and even in these days of its decay an influence across the world from Western Africa to the islands of the far East.

The language of the ancient Egyptians, though it cannot be classed in the Semitic family with Hebrew, has important points of correspondence, whether due to the long intercourse between the two races in Egypt, or to some deeper ancestral connection; and such analogies also appear in the Berber languages of North Africa. These difficult questions can merely be mentioned here. Attempts have been made, though with little result, to prove the Aryan and Semitic languages themselves to be descended from a single parent tongue. If it is so, then ages of change have so wiped away the traces of common origin that philological comparison fails to substantiate them. While speaking of the Aryan and Semitic families of language, it should be noticed that many philologists connect them as belonging to one class, as being “inflecting” languages, or such as can blend their roots and affixes, and alter the roots themselves internally so that, as the beginner in Greek grammar well knows, it is often no easy matter to see where the root ends and the termination begins. The inflecting families have certainly a power of compact word-formation which has done much to give expressiveness and accuracy to such poetical and philosophical languages as Greek and Arabic. But the distinction is by no means clear between the structure of such inflecting languages and the agglutinating languages of other nations, as the Tatars. Could the Aryan and Semitic families be both traced back to the same family, this would not prove the whole white race to have had one original language, for the Georgian of the Caucasus, the Basque of the Pyrenees, and several more would still lie outside, apparently unconnected with either of the great families, or with one another.

In the middle and north of Asia, on the steppes or among the swamps and forests of the bleak north, wandering hordes of hunters or herdsmen show the squat-built brown-yellow Tatar or Mongolian type, and speak languages of one family, such as Manchu and Mongol. Although principally belonging to Asia, these Tatar or Turanian languages have established themselves in Europe. At a remote period, rude Tatar tribes had spread over northern Europe, but they were followed up and encroached on by the invading Aryans, till now only much-mixed outlying remnants of them, Esths, Finns, Lapps, are found speaking Tatar languages. In later ages, history records how armies of Tatar race, Huns and Turks, poured into Europe in their turn, subduing the Aryan peoples, so that now the Hungarian and Turkish languages remain records of these last waves of invasion from Central Asia. The Tatar hordes are first heard of in history as barbarians, as many tribes are still, but their chief nations becoming Buddhists, Mohammedans, or Christians, have adopted the civilisation belonging to these religions. The Tatar languages are of the kind called agglutinative, forming words by putting first the root, which carries the sense and is followed by suffixes strung on to modify it. Thus in Turkish the root sev, to love, makes sevishdirilmediler, they were not to be brought to love one another. In some languages of this class, a remarkable law of vowel-harmony compels the suffix to conform its vowel to that of the root it is attached to, as if to make clear to the hearer that it belongs to it; thus in Hungarian ház = house, forms házam = my house, but szék = chair, forms székem = my chair.

The dense population of South-East Asia, comprising the Burmese, the Siamese, and especially the Chinese, shows a type of complexion and feature plainly related to the Tatar or Mongolian, but the general character of their language is different. The Chinese language is made up of monosyllables, each a word with its own real or grammatical sense, so that our infant-school books in one syllable give some notion of Chinese sentences. Other neighbouring languages share this habit of using monosyllables, and as this limits them to an inconveniently small number of words, they have taken to the expedient of making the musical pitch or intonation alter the meaning, as in Siamese, where the syllable ha, according to the notes it is intoned on, means a pestilence, or the number five, or the verb to seek. Thus the intoning which in England serves to express emotion or distinguish question from answer is turned to account in the far East for making actually different words, an example how language catches at any available device when a means of expression is wanted. Looking on the map of Asia at this south-east group of nations, it is plainly not by accident that the people of such neighbouring districts should have come to talk in words of one syllable, but the habit seems to have come from a common ancestral source, and gives the whole set of languages a family character. These monosyllable languages are often used to illustrate what the simple childlike constructions of man’s primitive speech may have been like. But it is well to mention that Chinese or Siamese, simple as they are, must not be relied on as primitive languages. The childlike Chinese phrases may be not primitive at all, but may come of the falling away of older complicated grammar, much as our own English tends to cut short the long words and drop the inflexions used by our ancestors. Chinese simplicity of grammar by no means goes with simplicity of thought and life. The Chinese nation, like the Egyptian and the Babylonian, had been raised to a highly artificial civilisation in ages before the Phœnicians and Greeks came out of barbarism. It is not yet clear to what race the old Babylonians belonged who spoke the Akkadian tongue, but this shows analogies which may connect it with the Tatar or Mongolian languages.

It has been already seen ([p. 102]) how the Malays, Micronesians, Polynesians, and Malagasy, a varied and mixed population of partly Mongoloid race, are united over their immense ocean-district half round the globe by languages of one family, the Malayo-Polynesian. The parent language of this family may have belonged to Asia, for in the Malay region the grammar is more complex, and words are found like tasik = sea and langit = sky, while in the distant islands of New Zealand and Hawaii these have come down to tai and lai, as though the language became shrunk and formless as the race migrated further from home, and sank into the barbaric life of ocean islanders.

The continent of India has not lost the languages of the tribes who were in the land before the Aryan invasion gave rise to the Hindu population. Especially in the south whole nations, though they have taken to Hindu civilisation, speak languages belonging to the Dravidian family, such as Tamil, Telugu, and Canarese. The importance of this element of Indian population may be seen by these non-Aryan tongues still extending over most of the great triangle of India south of the Nerbudda, besides remnants in districts to the north. Yet Aryan dialects are spoken in India by many mixed tribes who may have little of Aryan blood. In the forests of Ceylon are found the only people in the world leading a savage life who speak an Aryan language akin to ours. These are the Veddas or “hunters,” shy wild men who build bough huts, and live on game and wild honey, the children, as it seems, of forest-natives mingled with Singhalese outcasts whose language in a broken-down state they speak.

Among the black races, whether or not the eastern negros of Melanesia are connected by race with the African negros, the Melanesian languages stand apart. Nor do all African negros speak languages of one family, but some, such as the Mandingo, seem separate from the great language-family of Central and South Africa, named the Bantu from tribes calling themselves simply “men” (ba-ntu). One of the chief peculiarities of the Bantu languages is their working (just unlike the Tatar languages) by putting prefixes in front. Thus the African magician is called mganga, the plural of which is waganga, magicians. The Kafirs of a certain district bear the well-known name of the basuto, which is a plural form, a single native being called mosuto, while his country is lesuto, his language sesuto, and his character or quality bosuto. In South Africa lies a very different language-family, the Hottentot-Bushman, remarkable for the way in which “clicks,” much like what among us nurses make to children and coachmen to horses, do duty as consonants in words. Lastly, turning to America, the native languages fall into a variety of families. Some of these are known to English readers by a word or two, as the Eskimo of the Arctic coasts by the name of the kayak or single boat on which our sport canoes are modelled; the Algonquin which prevailed from New England to Virginia at the time of the early colonists, and whence we have mocassin and tomahawk; the Aztec of Mexico known by the ocelot and the cacao-bean; the Tupi-Carib of the West Indies and the Brazilian forests, the home of the toucan and jaguar; lastly the Quichua or Peruvian, the language of the inca.

In concluding this account of the chief families of language, it is to be noticed that there are many more, some only consisting of a few dialects or a single one. Altogether a list of fifty or a hundred might perhaps be made, of which no one has been satisfactorily shown to be related to any other. It may, indeed, be expected that often two or three which now seem separate may prove on closer examination to be branches of one family, but there seems no prospect of the families all coming together in this way as offshoots of one original language. The question whether there was one primitive speech, or many, has been in past times most useful in encouraging the scientific comparison of languages. Both theories claim to account for the actual state of language in the world. On the one hand it may be argued that the languages descended from the primitive tongue have branched off so far apart as often no longer to show their connection; on the other hand, if there were many primitive languages, of which those that survived have given rise to families, this would come to much the same state of things. But if, as seems likely, the original formation of language did not take place all at once, but was a gradual process extending through ages, and not absolutely stopped even now, then it is not a hopeful task to search for primitive languages at all (see [page 131]). In the present improved state of philology it answers better to work back from known languages to the lost ancestral languages whence they must have come down. It has been seen that this study leads to excellent results as to the history, not only of the languages themselves, but of the nations speaking them, as when it gives the clue to the peopling of the South Sea Islands, or proves some remote ancestral connexion between the ancient Britons, and the English and Danes who came after them to our land. Yet though language is so valuable a help and guide in national history, it must not be trusted as if it could give the whole origin of a race, or go back to its beginning. All negroes do not speak languages of one family, nor all yellow, or brown, or white men. In exploring the early life of nations, their languages may lead us far back, often much farther than historical records, but they seem hardly to reach anywhere near the origins of the great human races, still less to the general origin of mankind.

CHAPTER VII.
WRITING.

Picture-writing, [168]—Sound-pictures, [169]—Chinese Writing, [170]—Cuneiform Writing, [172]—Egyptian Writing, [173]—Alphabetic Writing, [175]—Spelling, [178]—Printing, [180].

Taught as we are to read and write in early childhood, we hardly realize the place this wondrous double art fills in civilized life, till we see how it strikes the barbarian who has not even a notion that such a thing can be. John Williams, the South Sea Island missionary, tells how once being busy carpentering, and having forgotten his square, he wrote a message for it with a bit of charcoal on a chip, and sent this to his wife by a native chief, who, amazed to find that the chip could talk without a mouth, for long afterwards carried it hung by a string round his neck, and told his wondering countrymen what he saw it do. So in South Africa a black messenger carrying a letter has been known to hide it under a stone while he loitered by the way, lest it should tell tales of him, as it did of whatever was going on. Yet the art of writing, mysterious as it seemed to these rude men, was itself developed by a few steps of invention, which if not easy to make, are at any rate easy to understand when made. Even uncivilized races have made the first step, that of picture-writing. Had the missionary merely made a sketch of his L-square on the chip, it would have carried his message, and the native would have understood the whole business as a matter of course. Beginning at this primitive stage, it will be possible to follow thence through its whole course the history of writing and printing.

Fig. 47.—Picture-writing, rock near Lake Superior (after Schoolcraft.)

Fig. 48.—Pater noster in Mexican picture-writing (after Aubin).

[Fig. 47] shows a specimen of picture-writing as used by the hunting tribes of North America. It records an expedition across Lake Superior, led by a chief who is shown on horseback with his magical drumstick in his hand. There were in all fifty-one men in five canoes, the first of them being led by the chief’s ally, whose name, Kishkemunazee, that is, Kingfisher, is shown by the drawing of this bird. Their reaching the other side seems to be shown by the land-tortoise, the well-known emblem of land, while by the picture of three suns under the sky it is recorded that the crossing took three days. Now most of this, childlike in its simplicity, consists in making pictures of the very objects meant to be talked of. But there are devices which go beyond this mere imitation. Thus when the tortoise is put to represent land, it is no longer a mere imitation, but has become an emblem or symbol. And where the bird is drawn to mean not a real kingfisher, but a man of that name, we see the first step toward phonetic writing or sound writing, the principle of which is to make a picture stand for the sound of a spoken word. How men may have made the next move toward writing may be learnt from the common child’s game of rebus, that is, writing words “by things.” Like many other games, this one keeps up in child’s sport what in earlier ages was man’s earnest. Thus if one writes the word “waterman” by a picture of a water-jug and a man, this is drawing the meaning of the word in a way hardly beyond the American Indian’s picture of the kingfisher. But it is very different when in a child’s book of puzzles one finds the drawing of a water-can, a man being shot, and a date-fruit, this representing in rebus the word “can-di-date.” For now what the pictures have come to stand for is no longer their meaning, but their mere sound. This is true phonetic writing, though of a rude kind, and shows how the practical art of writing really came to be invented. This invention seems to have been made more than once, and in somewhat different ways. The old Mexicans, before the arrival of the Spaniards, had got so far as to spell their names of persons and places by pictures, rebus fashion. Even when they began to be Christianized, they contrived to use their picture-writing for the Latin words of their new religion. Thus they painted a flag (pan), a stone (te), a prickly-pear (noch) ([Fig. 48]), which were together pronounced pa-te-noch-te, and served to spell pater noster, in a way that was tolerably exact for Mexicans who had no r in their language. In the same way they ended the prayer with the picture of water (a), and aloe (me), to express amen.

This leads on to a more important system of writing. Looking at the ordinary Chinese characters on tea chests or vases, one would hardly think they ever had to do with pictures of things. But there are fortunately preserved certain early Chinese characters, known as the “ancient pictures,” which show how what were at first distinctly formed sketches of objects came to be dashed off in a few strokes of the rabbit’s-hair pencil, till they passed into the meaningless-looking cursive forms now in use, as is seen in Fig. 49.

Fig. 49.—Chinese ancient pictures and later cursive forms (after Endlicher).

Fig. 50.—Chinese compound characters, pictures and sounds.

The Chinese did not stop short at making such mere pictures of objects, which goes but little way toward writing. The inventors of the present mode of Chinese writing wanted to represent the spoken sounds, but here they were put in a difficulty by their language consisting of monosyllables, so that one word has many different meanings. To meet this they devised an ingenious plan of making compound characters, or “pictures and sounds,” in which one part gives the sound, while the other gives the sense. To give an idea of this, suppose it were agreed that a picture of a box should stand for the sound box. As, however, this sound has several meanings, some sign must be added to show which is intended. Thus a key might be drawn beside it to show it is a box to put things in, or a leaf if it is to mean the plant called box, or a hand if it is intended for a box on the ear, or a whip would show that it was to signify the box of a coach. This would be for us a clumsy proceeding, but it would be a great advance beyond mere picture-writing, as it would make sure at once of the sound and the meaning. Thus in Chinese, the sound chow has various meanings, as ship, fluff, flickering, basin, loquacity. Therefore the character which represents a ship, chow, which is placed first in [Fig. 50], is repeated afterwards with additional characters to show which particular meaning of chow is intended. A recognisable pair of feathers is placed by it to mean chow = fluff; next, the sign of fire makes it chow = flickering; next, the sign of water makes it chow = basin; and lastly, the character for speech is joined to it to make chow = loquacity. These examples, though far from explaining the whole mystery of Chinese writing, give some idea of the principles of its sound-characters and keys or determinative signs, and show why a Chinese has to master such an immensely complicated set of characters in order to write his own language. To have introduced such a method of writing was an effort of inventive genius in the ancient Chinese, which their modern descendants show their respect for by refusing to improve upon it. At the same time it is not entirely through conservatism that they have not taken to phonetic writing like that of the western nations, for this would for instance confuse the various kinds of chow which their present characters enable them to keep separate. But the Japanese, whose language was better suited than the Chinese for being written phonetically, actually made themselves a phonetic system out of the Chinese characters. Selecting certain of these, they cut them down into signs to express sounds, one to stand for i, another for ro, another for fa, &c. Thus a set of forty-seven such characters (which they call accordingly the irofa), serve as the foundation of a system with which they write Japanese by sound more accurately than our writing conveys it.

Next, as to the cuneiform writing, such as is to be seen at the British Museum on the huge man-headed bulls of Nineveh, or on the flat baked bricks which were pages of books in the library of Sennacherib. The marks like wedges or arrow-heads arranged in groups and rows do not look much like pictures of objects. Yet there is evidence that they came at first from picture-writing; for instance, the sun was represented by a rude figure of it made by four strokes arranged round. Of the groups of characters in an inscription, some serve directly to represent objects, as man, woman, river, house, while other groups are read phonetically as standing for syllables. The inventors of this ancient system appear to have belonged to the Akkadian group of nations, the founders of early Babylonian civilization. In later ages the Assyrians and Persians learned to write their languages by cuneiform characters, in inscriptions which remain to this day as their oldest records. But the cuneiform writing was cumbrous in the extreme, and had to give way when it came into competition with the alphabet. To understand the origin of that invention, it is necessary to go back to a plan of writing which dates from antiquity probably even higher than the cuneiform of Babylonia, namely, the hieroglyphics of Egypt.

The earliest known hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt belong to a period approaching 3,000 B.C. Even at this ancient time the plan of writing was so far developed that the scribes had the means of spelling any word phonetically, when they chose. But though the Egyptians had thus come to writing by sound, they only trusted to it in part, combining it with signs which are evidently remains of earlier picture-writing. Thus the mere pictures of an ox, a star, a pair of sandals, may stand for ox, star, sandals. Even where they spelt words by their sounds, they had a remarkable way of adding what are called determinatives, which are pictures to confirm or explain the meaning of the spelt word. One short sentence given as an example from Renouf’s Egyptian Grammar, shows all these devices. The meaning is: “I (am) the Sun-god coming forth from the horizon against his enemies.” Here part of the pictures of animals and things are letters to be read into Egyptian words, as shown underneath. But others are still real pictures, intended to stand for what they represent. The sun is shown by his picture, with a one-mark below, and followed by the battle-axe which is the symbol of divinity, while further on comes a picture of the horizon with the sun on it. Beside these, some of the figures are determinative pictures to explain the words, the verb to walk being followed by an explanatory pair of legs, and the word enemy having the picture of an enemy after it, and then three strokes, the sign of plurality. It seems that the Egyptians began with mere picture-writing like that of the barbarous tribes of America, and though in after ages they came to use some figures as phonetic characters or letters, they never had the strength of mind to rely on them entirely, but went on using the old pictures as well. How they were led to make a picture stand for a sound is not hard to see. In the figure a character may be noticed which is read R. This is an outline of an open mouth, and indeed is often used to represent a mouth; but the Egyptian word for mouth being RO, the sign came to be used as a character or letter to spell the sound RO or R wherever it was wanted. So much of the history of the art of writing may thus be read in a single hieroglyphic sentence.