vail within the limits of a single species of animals; they are equal, rather, in range to those which belong to the whole animal kingdom. It is, to the other, like a microscopic image thrown up by optical means upon a wall, where its parts may be examined and measured and described and compared by even the unskilled student. Breadth of knowledge and competent judgment are to be won in physical ethnology only by rare opportunities, peculiar gifts, and prolonged training. Though languages are traditional institutions, they are of a special kind, capable of application to ethnological purposes far beyond any other, as being so various and so distinct as they are, capable of being looked at objectively, and handled and compared with accuracy. They are persistent, also, at least to a degree far be yond other institutions. To admit that a language can be exchanged, therefore, is by no means to deny its value as a record of human history, even of race-history; it is only to put that value upon its proper basis, and confess those limitations which can in no manner be avoided, and of which a due consideration is needful to the proper use of linguistic evidence. It still remains true that, upon the whole, language is determined by race, since each human being usually learns to speak from his parents and others of the same blood. And the marked exceptions to this rule take place in the full light of historical record. Civilization facilitates mixture, as it does communica tion. It is not the wild and obscure races which are, or have ever been, mixing blood and mixing or shifting speech upon a grand scale; it is the cultivated ones. one barbarous tribe overcomes another, unless the conquerors absorb the conquered into their own community, there is not usually a change of speech: but nations If like the Romans and Arabs, who come with the force of an organized polity and a literature, extend their speech widely over strange peoples. Where the information. derivable from language, therefore, is most needed, there it comes with the greatest presumption of accuracy. Hence, when the ethnological relations of a community or of a group of communities are to be settled, the first question is as to the affinities of its speech. This does not necessarily decide the case; the linguistic evidence may be overborne by some other; but nothing can be determined without it; it lays the basis for further discussion. We need only to quote an example or two in illustration of this. The Basques are a white, "Caucasian" race; there is nothing in their other ethnological characteristics which should forbid our connecting them with any great division of the white race; but their speech at once cuts them off from every other, and we accept its decision as authoritative. Out of what mixtures the original Iberians may have grown, we cannot tell; nor can we ever absolutely know that the Basques did not borrow their Euskarian dialect, as the French their Romanic dialect; there are indefinite possibilities lying behind; but the language tells us a great deal, and probably all that will ever be within our reach. Again, of the Etruscans there are records and descriptions and pictures, and products, art and industrial; but to settle the relationship of the race the ethnologists with one consent appeal to the infinitesimal remnants of Etruscan speech: a single page of connected Etruscan text, with but a hint of its meaning, would in the briefest time settle the question whether the race is to be connected with any other on earth, or whether, like the Basque, it is an isolated fragment. There lies before us a vast and complicated problem in the Ameri can races; and here, again, it is their language that must do by far the greatest part of the work in solving it. American ethnology depends primarily and in bulk on the classifications and connections of dialects; till that foundation is laid, all is uncertain; although there are points involved which may not yield even to the combination of all attainable evidence, from every quarter. We are to look for no real reconciliation between the results won by the two great branches of ethnological study until their methods are more fully established than at present; nor is it worth while to hurry the process-least of all, to attempt prematurely an artificial and superficial scheme of combination. All that will come in good time, if we only have patience. Within its own domain, each is supreme. The classifications and relations of speech are what they are, without any reference to underlying questions of race; and yet, those questions cannot be kept down and ignored by the linguist: his study is too thoroughly a historical one, it involves too much of the element of race in the later periods, to allow of our leaving that element out of account for the earlier. As one of the leading branches of historical investigation, as claiming to make its contribution to the elucidation of the past, it must offer its results to be criticised by every other concurrent branch. And to exaggerate its claims, or to put them upon a false basis, is both needless and harmful. If any one is not content with the degree of dignity and authority that belongs to the science of language when kept within the very strictest limits which a sound and impartial criticism is impelled to draw, there are other departments in which his aid will be welcomed, and he had better turn to them. There is one more point calling for brief notice in connection with our classification of the dialects of the world. That classification aimed at being a strictly genetical one, each family embracing those tongues which, by the sum of all available evidences, were deemed traceable to a common ancestor. To the historical philologist, still deep in the labor of determining relations and tracing out the course of structural development, this is by far the most important of all; indeed, the value of any other at present is so small as to be hardly worthy of notice. The wider distinction of languages as isolating, agglutinative, and inflective, which has a degree of currency and familiarity, offers a convenient, but far from exact or absolute, test by which the character of linguistic structure may be tried; the three degrees lie in a certain line of progress, but, as in all such cases, pass into one another. To lay any stress upon this as a basis of classification is like making the character of the hair or the color of the skin a basis of classification in physical ethnology, or the number of stamens or the combination of leaves in botany: it ignores and overrides other distinctions of an equal or of greater importance. If the naturalist had the actual certainty which the linguist has of the common descent of related species, he would care little for any other classification, but would spend his strength upon the elaboration and perfection of this one. The linguist has enough of this still left to do; and till it is all accomplished, at any rate, any other is of small account to him. CHAPTER XIV. NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. Language an acquisition, a part of culture. Its universality among men; limitation to man; difference between human and other means of expression. Communication the direct motive to the production of speech; this the conscious and determining element in all languagehistory. Natural cries as basis of the development; question as to their nature and range; postulation of instinctive articulate utterances uncalled for. Use of the voice as principal means of expression. Imitative element in the beginnings of speech; range and limits of onomatopoeic expression. The doctrine of roots. Sufficiency of this view of the origin of language; the opposing miraculous theory. Capacity involved in language-making; difference in this respect between men and lower animals. Relation of language to development of man; rate and manner of its growth. OUR examination of the history of language, of its mode of transmission, preservation, and alteration, has shown us clearly enough what we are to hold respecting its nature. It is not a faculty, a capacity; it is not an immediate exertion of the thinking power; it is a mediate product and an instrumentality. To many, superficial or prejudiced, inquirers this seems an unsatisfactory, even a low, view; but it is because they confound together two very different senses of the word language. Man possesses, as one of his most marked and distinctive characteristics, a faculty or capacity of speech-or, more |