AS A TEST OF MENTAL CAPACITY. 93 



a prosperous aud peaceful independence, winning the respect and goodwill of its neigh- 

 bours, both civilized and savage, developing a high degree of ingenuity in some of the 

 most delicate and difficult mechanical arts, and producing poetical compositions fit 1o 

 rank with or above the most notable productions of the founders of civilization — the 

 Assyrians aud Egyptians. Such, it is believed, is a fair statement of the results on 

 which, in this case, the students of linguistic ethnology may found a just claim in favour 

 of the methods and principles of their science. 



We now turn to another part of the globe, and to a very different race and language, 

 both of which will aftbrd some highly instructive lessons. By the common consent of 

 those ethnologists who do not base their science upon linguistic tests, the Australians are 

 ranked among the lowest, if not as the very lowest, of the races of men. In the time of 

 that pre-scientilic anthropology which prevailed half a century ago, when the various 

 hviman races, as well as the various species of animals, were .supposed to have somehow 

 come into being in the regions which they inhabited, the Australians, dwelling in a con- 

 tinental island of a past geological era and amid animals of the most primitive mam- 

 malian forms, were held to belong to a distinct human species, as primitive and as 

 imperfect as its surroundings. The Darwinian system swept away this fanciful notion; 

 but, ill understood by some of its votaries, it has given rise to another fancy hardly less 

 opposed to the principles of true science. The Australians have been accepted by some 

 distinguished members of this school (though not by Darwin himself) as the best sur- 

 viving representatives of the earliest men of the present human species. Their reasoning 

 may be stated succinctly in a syllogistic] form, as follows. The earliest men of the exist- 

 ing species must be supposed to have been the lowest of men in intellectual capacity and 

 in social condition. The Australian aborigines are now the lowest of men in intellect and 

 in social condition. They must therefore be deemed to represent more nearly than any 

 other race the character and social condition of the earliest men. 



Both premises assumed iu this reasoning are mere assumptions, which are not 

 only not based upon facts, but are opposed to the clearest indications derived from the 

 actual data we possess. There is no better reason for supposing the earliest men of the 

 present species to have been low in intellectual capacity than there is to suppose them to 

 have been small in stature and physically weak. The men who combated and over- 

 came the monsters of the quaternary era, the mammoth, the cave-bear, and the 

 cave-lion, and whose earliest historical offspring reared the vast architectural piles of 

 Egypt and Assyria, must have been as vigorous iu mind as in body. As for their sup- 

 posed modern representatives, the Australians, it is astonishing that highly educated men, 

 professors of philosophy, who iindertake to treat of the intellect of a race, should refuse 

 to consider that prime and incomparable exponent of intellect, the language. Whether 

 we accept the view of Max Millier and the high authorities whom he cites on his side — 

 that speech and reason are identical (or rather, like heat and motion, are dilferent mani- 

 festations of the same force)' — or whether we retain the more common opinion that speech 

 is the expression of thought — in either case the language of a people ought to be the first 

 evidence to which we should resort in judging of its intellectual endowment. We may 

 now briefly consider this invaluable evidence, and some very curious aud unexpected con- 

 clusions to which it leads. 



■ " The Science of Thought," chap. i. 



