474 ANTHROPOLOGY 



civilization, from savagery through barbarism to civilization, or from 

 an assumed pre-savagery through the same stages to enlightenment. 



The endeavor to establish a schematic line of evolution naturally 

 led back to new attempts at classification, in which each group 

 bears a genetic relation to the other. Such attempts have been 

 made from both the cultural and the biological point of view. 



It is necessary to speak here of one line of anthropological re- 

 search that we have hitherto disregarded. I mean the linguistic 

 method. The origin of language was one of the much-discussed 

 problems of the nineteenth century, and, owing to its relation to 

 the development of culture, it has a direct anthropological bear- 

 ing. The intimate ties between language and ethnic psychology 

 were expressed by no one more clearly than by Steinthal, who 

 perceived that the form of thought is molded by the whole social 

 environment of which language is part. Owing to the rapid change 

 of language, the historical treatment of the linguistic problem had 

 developed long before the historic aspect of the natural sciences 

 was understood. The genetic relationship of languages was clearly 

 recognized when the genetic relationship of species was hardly 

 thought of. With the increasing knowledge of languages, they 

 were grouped according to common descent, and, when no further 

 relationship could be proved, a classification according to mor- 

 phology was attempted. To the linguist, whose whole attention 

 is directed to the study of the expression of thought by language, 

 language is the individuality of a people, and therefore a classi- 

 fication of languages must present itself to him as a classification 

 of peoples. No other manifestation of the mental life of man can 

 be classified so minutely and definitely as language. In none are 

 the genetic relations more clearly established. It is only when no 

 further genetic and morphological relationship can be found, that 

 the linguist is compelled to coordinate languages and can give no 

 further clue regarding their relationship and origin. No wonder, 

 then, that this method was used to classify mankind, although 

 in reality the linguist classified only languages. The result of the 

 classification seems eminently satisfactory on account of its de- 

 finiteness as compared with the result of biological and cultural 

 classifications. 



Meanwhile the methodical resources of biological or somatic 

 anthropology had also developed, and had enabled the investi- 

 gator to make nicer distinctions between human types than he 

 had been able to make. The landmark in the development of this 

 branch of anthropology has been the introduction of the metric 

 method, which owes its first strong development to Quetelet. A 

 little later we shall have to refer to this subject again. For the 

 present it may suffice to say that a clearer definition of the terms 



