VARIETIES OF MANKIND. 



1345 



is not a little remarkable that the earliest 

 civilisation of which we have any distinct 

 traces in the western portion of the Old 

 \Vorld, perhaps the very earliest develop- 

 ment of the arts of life and of a spiritual phi- 

 losophy that man has witnessed should have 

 presented itself in a race which was not only 

 African in its locality, but also in its affinities, 

 such being demonstrably the character of the 

 Ancient Egyptians, as will be seen hereafter. 

 Yet to this race the civilisation of Greece, of 

 Rome, and of Western Europe may be in 

 great measure ascribed ; and long after the 

 time when its power and intelligence had 

 gained their highest state of development, the 

 progenitors of the Anglo-Saxon race, both in 

 Britain and in Germany, were in a state of 

 barbaric ignorance and brutalism. 



Referring, for the particulars of this part of 

 the enquiry, to the valuable collection of in- 

 formation brought together by Dr. Prichard 

 chiefly from the records of the Moravian mis- 

 sionaries who have planted themselves over 

 almost every portion of the habitable globe, 

 and who have gained a more intimate ac- 

 quaintance with the mental habits and feelings 

 of the people among whom they dwell, than 

 has been acquired by any other class of Eu- 

 ropean settlers; the following may be adopted 

 as its general results : In all the races of 

 mankind, with which any adequate acquaint- 

 ance has been gained, unequivocal indi- 

 cations may be discerned of the same moral 

 and intellectual nature as that which the most 

 civilised tribes exhibit ; and these indications 

 become more obvious, the more complete is 

 our knowledge of their habits, not merely of 

 action, but of thought. We can trace, in 

 short, among all the tribes who are endowed 

 with the faculty of articulate speech, the same 

 rational, human nature; superior to that of 

 the highest brutes, not merely in the com- 

 plexity of the processes which it is capable of 

 performing, but in that capacity for generating 

 abstract ideas, and thus arriving at general 

 principles, which, so far as we have the means 

 of judgment, appears to be the distinguishing 

 attribute of man. So, again, we discover in 

 all of them the same elements of moral feeling; 

 the same sympathies and susceptibilities of 

 affection ; the same conscience, or internal 

 conviction of accountableness, more or less 

 fully developed ; the same sentiments of guilt 

 and self-condemnation, and the same desire 

 for expiation. These principles take very 

 different forms of expression, even in civilised 

 life ; much more, therefore, ought we to be 

 prepared for finding nothing more, even among 

 the best specimens of uncivilised barbarism, 

 than the mere rudiments of a higher under- 

 standing, and of a nobler moral nature, than 

 that which they have at present reached. 

 But the rudiments are there, though not 

 always in the same degree of forwardness for 

 being moulded to the institutions of a more 

 regular society, for the development of the 

 intellectual powers under a rational education, 

 and for that growth of the moral and religious 

 sentiments which Christianity is pre-eminently 



VOL. IV, 



fitted to promote in every mind that opens 

 itself to its benign influence. 



The general conclusion, then, which we 

 seem entitled to draw from the Anatomical, 

 Physiological, and Psychological facts to which 

 reference has been made, is that all the 

 human races may have had a common origin ; 

 since they all possess the same constant cha- 

 racters, and differ only in those which can 

 be shown to vary from generation to genera- 

 tion. We have now to inquire, lastly, into 

 the bearing of philological evidence upon the 

 same question ; and as this department of the 

 inquiry is more foreign than the preceding to 

 the character of the present work, a brief 

 notice of its chief results is all that can be 

 here admitted. These results, it may be re- 

 marked, are of extremely recent acquisition. 

 In fact, there is no department of ethnology 

 in which progress is at present so rapid, as it 

 is in the study of glottology. 



Now it may be observed, in the first place, 

 that what has been just said of the com- 

 munity of psychical nature amongst the se- 

 veral races of mankind, is very strongly con- 

 firmed by the general fact of the universality 

 of spoken language, and of the power of trans- 

 lating from one language to another. Dogs 

 and monkeys may have languages of their 

 own ; but there is no such relation between 

 these and ours, as may enable us to com- 

 prehend them ; and where brute animals 

 have been taught to comprehend human Ian- 

 guage, it has been only so far as to acquire 

 a mental association between the sounds of 

 certain words, and the material objects which 

 they represent. This is but the first and 

 simplest stage of the acquirement of language, 

 as every one must perceive, who watches the 

 development of the power of communication 

 by this means, in early childhood. A very 

 large part of all languages, but especially of 

 those employed by nations advanced in in- 

 tellectual culture, consists of terms expressive 

 of ideas and relations, rather than of material 

 objects ; and it is in the capacity for ex- 

 pressing the former, that the distinctive at- 

 tributes of human language appear specially to 

 consist. This capacity, though existing more 

 or less in all languages, will obviously vary 

 considerably in degree, according to the in- 

 tellectual culture of the people of whose 

 thoughts they are the habitual expression ; 

 and the power of fully rendering the thoughts 

 conveyed by one language into another 

 tongue, must of course depend in great part 

 upon the relative advancement of the two. 

 The abstractions of a German transcendental 

 philosopher do not always admit of being ef- 

 fectively conveyed, even in a tongue so nearly 

 related as the English to their original, far 

 less could they be translated into Hottentot 

 gibberish. So, again, the peculiar style of 

 eloquence cultivated in the East, does not 

 produce its adequate effect, when rendered in 

 Western tongues. But any two barbarous 

 languages, or any two which are highly cul- 

 tivated, are, on the whole, so pervaded by a 



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