5i6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



humbug has vanished into the limbo of central Asia, whence he 

 never came, according to our latest authorities. (If he existed at all, 

 it was probably in Scandinavia.) 



A race, indeed, may speak the language of another without 

 having received any appreciable admixture of its blood; just as, 

 for example, the pure-blooded negroes of the West Indies and the 

 Southern States speak no tongue but English, Creole French, or 

 Spanish. So, again, English has become the language of Ireland, 

 without interfering to any large degree with the Celtic nationality 

 of the people; indeed, writers who talk about the " Anglo-Saxon 

 race " in America and the colonies forget that the Anglo-Saxon 

 who emigrates is generally either an Irishman, a Welshman, or a 

 Highland Scot, without prejudice to the chance of his being a 

 Cornish miner or a Celtic Yorkshireman. Through these Angli- 

 cized Celts, the English language has taken possession of ITortli 

 America, South Africa, and Australasia; not only is it swallowing 

 up the French of Canada or Louisiana, the Spanish of California or 

 ISFew Mexico, and the Dutch of the Cape, but in the ISTew World it 

 has blotted out the African and Indian tongues, and is assimilating 

 in the second generation the German, Scandinavian, Russian, and 

 Italian immigrants. Your true New-Englander is not a prolific 

 father, like the German or the Irishman; and I believe myself that 

 the proportion of Anglo-Saxondom in the America of our day has 

 been grossly overrated. " Anglo-Celtic " is perhaps the truest de- 

 scription of the British nationality. 



One of the greatest surprises of modern discovery in ethnical 

 and linguistic science is similarly the overthrow of the Great Chinese 

 Fallacy. Time was when the remote antiquity of China and Chinese 

 civilization was an article of faith for European scholars. It was be- 

 lieved that the yellow man had developed his own culture, such as it 

 is, independently for himself, in the far east of Asia. He was the 

 pioneer in writing, printing, and the use of gunpowder. But now 

 Chinese scholars have shown us, alas! that China really derived its 

 civilization, like all the rest of us, by indirect steps, from Babylonia 

 and Egypt. M. Terrien de Lacouperie first demonstrated the fact 

 that long before the ancestors of the Celestial race reached the 

 middle kingdom which they now inhabit, by the Hoang-Ho and the 

 Yang-tse-Kiang, they lived in close contact with that ancient civilized 

 people, the Akkadians of Babylonia. From the wise men of Akkad 

 they learned the rudiments of their arts; and when they set forth 

 from Mesopotamia, a little horde of Bak tribes, on their long journey 

 eastward, they carried with them both the early elements of Akka- 

 dian science, and the words and phrases of the Akkadian language. 

 They reached China with letters, astronomy, and arts ready made, and 



