338 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Oct, 



dance ; and indicate similar wants, contrivances, customs, ideas, in 

 different races of men living in different periods. Even when in 

 the same country, as in Switzerland, or England, or Denmark, suc- 

 cessive deposits of instruments of stone, bronze, or iron ; successive 

 burials of pines, beeches, and oaks ; successively extinguished races 

 of elephants, elks, and reindeer, give us a real scale of elapsed 

 time, it is one of which the divisions are not yet valued in years or 

 centuries of years. 



Toward a right judgment of the length of this scale of human 

 occupation, two other lines of evidence may be thought worthy of 

 notice ; one founded on the anatomical study of the remains of 

 early men, the other on the laws of language. If the varieties of 

 physical structure in man, and the deviations of language from an 

 original type, be natural effects of time and circumstance, the 

 length of time may be in some degree estimated by the amount of 

 the diversities which are observed to have happened, compared 

 with the variation which is now known to be happening. This 

 process becomes imaginary, unless we assume all mankind to have 

 had one local centre, and one original language. Its results must 

 be erroneous, unless we take fully into account the superior fixity 

 of languages which are represented in writing, and the greater 

 tendency to diversity of every kind which must have prevailed in 

 early times, when geographical impediments were aggravated by 

 dissocial habits of life. It appears, however, certain that some 

 differences of language, organisation, and habits have separated 

 men of apparently unlike races during periods longer than those 

 which rest on historical facts (I). 



Ever since the days of Aristotle, the analogy existing among 

 all parts of the animal kingdom, and in a general sense we may 

 say among all the forms of life, has become more and more the 

 subject of special study. Related as all living beings are to the 

 element in which they move and breathe, to the mechanical ener- 

 gies of nature which they employ or resist, and to the molecular 

 forces which penetrate and transform them, some general con- 

 formity of structure, some frequently recurring resemblance of 

 function, must be present, and cannot be overlooked. In the 

 several classes this analogy grows stronger, and in the subdivisions 

 of these classes real family affinity is recognised. In the smallest 

 divisions which have this family relation in the highest degree. 



(0 Max Muller on the Science of Language. 



