1000 OP THE BRANCHES OF THE HUMAN FAMILY. 



to which the zealous pursuit of it by a large number of philosophic Philol- 

 ogists seems undoubtedly to tend. There can be no reasonable doubt that, 

 as a general principle, the affinities of races are more surely indicated by 

 their languages than by their physical features; and the experienced philol- 

 ogist is generally able to discriminate those resemblances, which may have 

 arisen out of the introduction of words or of modes of construction from the 

 one into the other, by conquest, commercial intercourse, or absolute inter- 

 mixture, from those which are the result of a community of origin. And 

 thus are supplied those means of tracing the past history of races, which are 

 seldom afforded by written records, or even (at least with any degree of cer- 

 tainty) by traditional information. It is to be borne in mind that the affini- 

 ties of languages are indicated, not merely by verbal resemblance, but by 

 the similarity of their modes of grammatical construction, or the methods 

 by which the relation between different words that constitute sentences is 

 indicated. The most positive evidence is of course afforded, when a con- 

 formity exists both in the vocabularies and in the modes of construction of two 

 languages; but it frequently happens that although the conformity exists in 

 regard to one of these alone, yet the evidence which it affords is perfectly 

 satisfactory. Thus, there are many cases in which the vocabularies are so 

 continually undergoing important changes (the want of written records not 

 permitting them to acquire more than a traditional permanence), that their 

 divergence becomes so great, even in the course of a few generations, as to 

 prevent tribes which are by no means remotely descended from a common 

 ancestry, from understanding one another; whilst yet the system of gram- 

 matical construction, which depends more upon the grade of mental develop- 

 ment and upon habits of thought, exhibits a remarkable permanence. Such 

 appears to be true of the entire group of American languages; which seem, 

 as a whole, to be legimately referable to a common stock, notwithstanding 

 their complete verbal diversity. On the other hand, when two languages 

 or groups of languages differ greatly in construction, but present that kind 

 of verbal correspondence on which the philologist feels justified in placing 

 most reliance (namely, an essential conformity in those "primary words" 

 which serve to represent the universal ideas of a people in the most simple 

 state of existence), that correspondence may be held to indicate a community 

 of origin if it can be proved that it has not been the result of intercourse be- 

 tween the two families of nations subsequently to their first divergence, and 

 if it seems probable on other grounds that their separation took place at a 

 period when as yet the grammatical development of both languages was in 

 its infancy. Such appears to have been the case with certain of those groups 

 of languages whose distinctness can be traced back historically for the longest 

 period. 1 It is evident, then, that Philological inquiry must be looked to as 

 one of the chief means of determining the question of radiation from a sinr/le 

 centre or from multiple centres; audit is a remarkable fact, that the lin- 

 guistic affinity and the conformity in physical characters frequently stand in 

 a sort of complemental relation to each other, each being the strongest 

 where the other is weakest; so that, by one or other of these links of con- 

 nection, a close relationship is indicated between all those families of nations 

 under which the several races appear to be most naturally grouped. 



2. General Survey of the Principal Varieties of the Human Species. 



846. The distribution of the Races of Mankind under five primary varie- 

 ties, according to their respective types of cranial conformation, as first pro- 



1 The changes, or stages of growth and development, through which all languages 

 probably pass have been traced in a most interesting manner by Prof. Max Miiller, 

 in his Lectures on the Science of Language, 1861 ; see Lectures ii and viii. 



