THE DISPERSION 207 



eyes of few of them. In this paper he maintains the 

 importance of language as a ground of anthropo- 

 logical classification, and then uses his wide knowledge 

 of the languages of American aborigines, and other rude 

 races, to show that the grammatical complexity and 

 logical perfection of these languages implies a high 

 intellectual capacity in their original framers, and 

 that where such complex and perfect languages are 

 spoken by very rude tribes like the Australian 

 aborigines, they originated with cultivated and 

 intellectual peoples in the case of the Australian, 

 with the civilised primitive Dravidians of India. He 

 thus shows that languages, like alphabets, have 

 undergone a process of degradation, so that those 

 of modern times are less perfect exponents of 

 thought than those which preceded them, and that 

 primitive man in his earliest state must have been 

 endowed with as high intellectual powers as any of 

 his descendants. 



On similar grounds he shows that it is not in the 

 outlying barbarous races that we are to look for truly 

 primitive man, since here we have merely degraded 

 types, and that the primitive centres of man and 

 language must have been in the old historic lands of 

 Western Asia and Northern Africa. On this view 

 the time necessary for the development of the arts ol 

 civilisation and of extensive colonisation would not 

 be great. * In five centuries a single human pair 

 planted in a fertile oasis might have given origin to 

 a people of five hundred thousand souls, numerous 



