Dr Hodgkin on the Progress of Ethnology. 131 



Thus, thanks to the ethnologist, not only is an affinity dis- 

 covered between the ancient Londoner and his Roman in- 

 vader, which neither of them suspected, but between him and 

 those very people on the banks of the Ganges, whom the mo- 

 dern Londoner has invaded and subdued. No example can 

 more strikingly exhibit what the ethnologist may do in dis- 

 covering and establishing incontrovertible facts, where, at 

 first, it would seem that even conjecture must be lost. 

 But it is a broad sheet which extends from the Hebrides to 

 Hindostan, and which requires to be filled up with countless 

 details. The time which has elapsed between the arrival of 

 the oriental Celt in the British islands and the present day, 

 unmeasured by the chronologist, has produced countless inva- 

 sions, emigrations, intermixtures of families, and changes in 

 modes of life, by which the plastic animal man has been mo- 

 dified without any record of the changes so brought about. 

 Hence the ethnologist, in demonstrating one grand fact, has 

 opened the way to innumerable questions for his future solu- 

 tion. 



If I have succeeded in making myself intelligible in these 

 remarks, which have been designed to shew the increase of 

 interest which results from connecting local and partial details 

 with the comprehensive whole of which they are the part, it 

 will at once be seen that the extension of the same principle is 

 only limited by the habitable parts of the globe, and that if we 

 succeed in establishing a group of mankind stretching from 

 the Ultima Thule of the ancients to India beyond the Ganges, 

 and that, in doing this, the partial absence of an historic record 

 does not present an insuperable barrier, we should not be de- 

 terred from anticipating the like success with regard to other 

 portions ; although the assistance to be derived from history 

 may be far less, or even wanting altogether. With regard to 

 some of them, the subject of enquiry is obviously more simple. 

 Thus, in the American races, though there are diff*erences 

 which sufficiently distinguish tribes from each other, they are 

 consistent with so striking a unity of type, that the resem- 

 blance has been recongnised from the Chippewyans bordering 

 on the Esquimax, to the Terra del Fuejians in the vicinity of 

 Capo Horn. 



