398 LANGUAGE AND RACE. 



which characterise the other two. The advocates of the De- 

 velopment theory would do well to consider this, and explain 

 how it is that, in spite of the occurrence of inflectional phe- 

 nomena, the Agglutinate group has (as far back as the 

 evidence at our disp)Osal goes) always been agglutinative, 

 and the Isolating group, isolating. Chinese possesses forms 

 which may be classed as agglutinative, and yet throughout 

 the whole course of its long historical existence it has con- 

 tinued as true to its primitive type as the Isolating dialects 

 of barbarous Taic tribes. The Finnic verb may be called 

 inflectional, but for all that the Finnic group is not less 

 agglutinative than the Accadian of 4,000 years ago. Arj^an 

 has always been inflectional, so far back as our veritable 

 facts allow us to go ; and to assign to it a preceding era of 

 agglutination is an hypothesis which has history against it " 

 (Sayce). That a language remains true to its type is the 

 teaching of the known facts of philology. 



Seeing, then, that there are these significant groups of lan- 

 guages, the question naturally arises. Do the main divisions 

 of the human race run parallel with them ? On the threshold 

 of this inquiry we meet with a great difficulty, — I mean the 

 extraordinary variations in the mode of classification of races 

 which have been adopted by different anthropologists. It 

 has been well remarked by Peschel, "No one can feel more 

 forcibly the weakness of the opinion which holds to the 

 immutability of racial characters than one who has endea- 

 voured to describe various nations, for no single character- 

 istic is strictly the exclusive possession of any race of men, 

 but each loses itself by imperceptible gradations. If it were 

 easy to draw the line between the various races, anthropolo- 

 gists would not so far differ from one another, that one 

 feels himself obliged to separate mankind into tico, another 

 into one hundred and fifty ^ species, races, or families." 



