Sept. 29, 1887] 



NATURE 



511. 



THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 

 SECTION II. 



ANTHROPOLOGY. 



Opening Address by Prof. A. H. Sayce, M.A., President 

 OF THE Section. 



Surprise has sometimes been expressed that anthropology, 

 the science of man, should have been the last of the sciences to 

 come into being. But the fact is not so strange as it seems at 

 first sight to be. Science originated in curiosity, and the 

 curiosity of primitive man, like the curiosity of a child, was 

 first exercised upon the objects around him. The fact that we 

 are separate from the world about us, and that the world about 

 us is our own creation, is a conviction which grows but slow ly 

 in the mind either of the individual or of the race in general. 

 The child says, "Charley likes this," before he learns to say, 

 " /like this," and in most languages the objective case of the 

 personal pronoun exhibits earlier forms than the nominative. 



Moreover, it is only through the relations that exist between 

 mankind and external nature that we can arrive at anything like 

 a scientific knowledge of man. Science, it n ust be remembered, 

 implies the discovery of general laws, and general laws are only 

 possible if we deal, not with the single individual, but with 

 individuals when grouped together in races, tribes, or 

 communities. We can never take a photograph of the 

 mind of an individual, but we can come to know the 

 principles that govern the actions of bodies of men, and can 

 employ the inductive method of science to discover the physical 

 and moral characteristics of tribes and races. It is through 

 the form of the skull, the nature of the language, the 

 manners and customs, or the religious ideas of a people 

 that we can gain a true conception of their history and charac- 

 ter. The thinker who wishes to carry out the precept of the 

 Delphian oracle and to " know himself" must study himself as 

 reflected in the community to which he belongs. The sum of 

 the sciences which deal with the relations of the community to 

 the external world will constitute the science of anthropology. 



The field occupied by the science is a vast one, and the several 

 workers in it must be content to cultivate portions of it only. 

 The age of "admirable Crichtons " is past; it would be 

 impossible for a single student to cover with equal success the 

 whole domain of anthropology. All that he can hope to do is 

 to share the labour with others, and to concentrate his energies 

 on but one or two departments in the wide field of research. A 

 day may come when the work we have to perform will be 

 accomplished, and our successsors will reap the harvest that we 

 have sown. But meanwhile we must each keep to our own special 

 line of investigation, asking only that others whose studies have 

 lain a different direction shall help us with the results they have 

 o'.tained. 



I shall therefore make no apology for confining myself on the 

 present occasion to those branches of anthropological study 

 about which I know most. It is mote particularly to the study 

 of language, and the evidence we may derive from it as to the 

 history and development of mankind, that 1 wish to direct your 

 attention. It is in language that the thoughts and feelings of 

 man are mirrored and embodied ; it is through language that 

 we learn the little we know about what is passing in the minds 

 of others. Language is not only a means of intercommunica- 

 tion, it is also a record of the ideas and beliefs, the emotions 

 stod the hopes of the past generations of the world. In spoken 

 language, accordingly, we may discover the fossilized records of 

 early humanity, as well as the reflection of the thoughts that 

 move the society of to-day. What fossils are to the geologist 

 words are to the comparative philologist. 



But we must be careful not to press the testimony of language 

 beyond its legitimate limits. I anguage is essentially a social 

 product, the creation of a community of men living together and 

 moved by the same wants and desires. It is one of the chief 

 bonds that bind a community together, and its existence and 

 development depend upon the community to which it belongs. 

 If the community is changed by conquest or intermarriage or 

 any other cause the language of the community changes too. 

 The individual who quits one community for another has at 

 he same time to shift his language. The Frenchman who 

 laturalizes himself in England must acquire English ; the negro 

 .vho is born in the United States must adopt the language that 

 s spoken theie. ' 



Language is thus a characteristic of a community, and not of- 

 an individual. The neglect of this fact has introduced untold mis- 

 chief not only into philology, but into ethnology as well. Race 

 and language have been confused together, and the fact that a 

 man speaks a particular language has too often been assumed, in- 

 spite of daily experience, to prove that he belongs to a par- 

 ticular race. When scholars had discovered that the Sanskrit of 

 India belonged to the same linguistic family as the European 

 languages, they jumped to the conclusion that the dark-skinned' 

 Hindu and the light-haired Scandinavian must also belong to one 

 and the same race. Time after time I have taken up books which 

 sought to determine the racial afifinities of savage or barbarous 

 tribes by means of their language alone. Language and race, in 

 short, have been usfd as s}'nonymous terms. 



The fallacy is still so common, still so frequently peeps out 

 where we should least expect it, that I think it is hardly super- 

 fluous, even now, to draw attention to it. And yet we have 

 only to look around us to see how contrary it is to all the facts 

 of experience. We Englishmen are bound together by a 

 common language, but the historian and the craniologist will 

 alike tell us that the blood that runs in our veins is derived from a 

 very various ancestry. Kelt and Teuton, Scandinavian and Roman, 

 have struggled together for the mastery in our island since it 

 first came within the horizon of history, and in the remoter days 

 of which history and tradition are silent archasology assures us that 

 there were yet other races who fought and mingled together. The 

 Jews have wandered through the world adopting the languages 

 of the peoples amongst whom they have settled, and in Transyl- 

 vania they even look upon an old form of Spanish as their 

 sacred tongue. The Cornishman now speaks English ; is he on 

 that account less of a Kelt than the Welshman or the Breton ? 



Language, however, is not wholly without value to the ethno- 

 logist. Though a common language is not a test of race, it 

 is a test of social contact. And social con' act may mean — 

 indeed very generally does mean — a certain amount of inter- 

 rr^arriage as well. The penal laws passed against the Welsh in 

 the fifteenth century were not sufficient to prevent marriages now 

 and then between the Welsh and the English, and in spite of 

 the social ostracism of the negro in the Northern States of 

 America intermarriages have taken place there between the 

 black and the while population. But in the case of such inter- 

 marrying the racial traits of one member only of the union are 

 as a general rule preserved. The physical and moral type of the 

 stronger parent prevails in the end, though it is often not easy to 

 tell beforehand on which side the strength will lie. Sometimes, 

 indeed, the physical and moral characters a^e not inherited 

 together, the child following one of his parents in physical type 

 while he inherits his moral and intellectual qualities from the other. 

 But even in such cases the types preserve a wonderful fixity, and 

 testify to the difficulty of changing what we call the characteristics 

 of race. 



Herein lies one of the most obvious differences between 

 race and language, a difference which is of itself sufficient to 

 show how impossible it must be to argue from the one to the 

 other. While the characteristics of race seem alocost indelible, 

 language is as fluctuating and variable as the waves of the sea. 

 It is perpetually changing in the mouths of its speakers ; nay, 

 the individual can even forget the language of his childhood and 

 acquire another which has not the remotest connexion with it. 

 A man cannot rid himself of the characteristics of race, but his 

 language is like his clothing which he can strip off and change 

 almost at will. 



It seems to me that this is a fact of which only one explanati n 

 is possible. The distinctions of race must be older than the dis- 

 tinctions of language. On the monuments of Egypt, more than four 

 thousand years ago, the Libyans are represented with the same fair 

 European complexion as that of the modern Kabyles, and the 

 painted tomb of Rekh-ma-ra, a Theban prince who lived in the 

 sixteenth century before our era, portrays the black-skinned 

 negro, the olive- coloured Syrian, and the red-skinned Egyptian 

 with all the physical peculiarities that distinguish their de- 

 scendants to day. The Egyptian language has ceased to be 

 spoken even in its latest Coptic form, but the wooden figure of the 

 " Sheikh-el-beled " in the Bulaq Museum, car\'ed six thousand 

 years ago, reproduces the features of many a fellah in the modern 

 villages of the Nile. Within the limits of history racial charac- 

 teristics have undei^one no change. 



I see, therefore, no escape from the conclusion that the chief 

 distinctions of race were established long before man acquired 

 language. If the statement made by M. de Mortillet is true. 



I 



