RACE AND LANGUAGE. 341 



of mankind ; but there is no science of ethnology, for the attempt to 

 classify mankind in grouj^s has failed on every hand." 



No one who reviews the latest works on this subject can deny that 

 the opinion which Major Powell thus expresses, with a conscientious 

 frankness that does him honor, is fully justified by their contents. 

 And it should be added that he has not been the only one, or the first, 

 to express this opinion. Among those who have written on this sub- 

 ject, no one has achieved a higher reputation than Oscar Peschel, 

 whose too early death deprived the world of a master in this branch 

 of study. In his well-known work on " The Races of Men and their 

 Geographical Distribution " — a work unsurpassed for wide research and 

 acute insight — he passes in review all the physical traits which have 

 been proposed as means of race-distinction, and finds them all insuffi- 

 cient. ' He concludes his chapter on the subject in terms as decided as 

 those of Major Powell. " In summing up," he says, " we must needs 

 confess that neither the shape of the skull nor any other portion of the 

 skeleton has afforded distinguishing marks of the human races ; that 

 the color of the skin likewise displays only various gradations of dark- 

 ness ; and that the hair alone comes to the aid of our systematic at- 

 tempts, and even this not always, and never with sufficient decisive- 

 ness. Who, then," he adds, " can presume to talk of the immutability 

 of racial types ? To base a classification of the human race on the 

 character of the hair only, as Haeckel has done, was a hazardous vent- 

 ure, and could but end as all other artificial systems have ended.'''* 



If all artificial systems of classifying human races have ended in 

 failure, shall we renounce all attempts at such classification, and affirm 

 that there is no such science as ethnology ? Or shall we endeavor to 

 discover some natural method by which the numerous varieties that 

 we all recognize in the populations of the globe can be clearly and 

 positively distinguished and classified ? We have a notable example 

 set before us in the history of another science, which from a crude 

 and hopeless chaos — made by centuries of the acutest study and ob- 

 servation only more confused, irrational, and perplexing — was sud- 

 denly, by a single discovery, transformed into one of the clearest, most 

 regular, and most fruitful of sciences. When Aristotle pronounced 

 that all substances were derived from four elements, fire, air, earth, 

 and water, the science of chemistry may be said to have been as far 

 advanced as was that of ethnology when Linngeus made his four di- 

 visions of humankind into the white European, the brown Asiatic, 

 the red American, and the black African. Nearly twenty-two centu- 

 ries passed from the time of Aristotle before Lavoisier, Berthollet, 

 Gay-Lussac, and, above all, Dalton, discerned the true physical ele- 

 ments and their modes of combination, and thus made chemistry a 

 science. 



Many scholars have sought to find in language the basis of a natu- 

 ral classification of the races of men. Their attempts have thus far 



