viii THE HUMAN EACES 347 



and hieratic writing of the ancient Egyptians, from which the 

 Phoenician alphabet the source of all our European writing 

 was derived. Some philologists, F. Miiller and Trombetti amongst 

 others, consider the fundamental characteristic of the languages 

 spoken by man to be of such importance, that they base on them 

 their classification and derivation of the different human races. 

 Investigations of a more profound order, however, show this 

 hypothesis to be untenable. 



Von Luschan (1911) rightly observed that oneness of 

 language does not always involve oneness of race. Meinhof, who 

 studied all the dialects spoken by the peoples of Northern and 

 Central Africa, proved that all these dialects, which appear different, 

 really belong to one and the same language, Bantu, from which 

 they are derived by simple phonetic changes. Morphological, 

 ethnological, and historical research all prove that the inhabitants 

 of this vast tract of country belong to different races, which have 

 become mixed during various immigrations. Von Luschan, who 

 is at one with Lepsius on this point, notes that in every immigra- 

 tion of foreign races the immigrants are very few in number, in 

 comparison to the old inhabitants of the country. 



" They have burnt their boats behind them, they have no 

 Hinterland of race akin to their own, they have few or no women 

 with them, and they are not acclimatised like the older inhab- 

 itants. Hence the further they are from their native land, the 

 smaller their number in comparison with that of the natives, the 

 fewer the women they have brought with them, and the more 

 unfavourable the influence of the new climate, the more quickly 

 will they become fused with the original population as regards 

 their physical characteristics. When, however, we come to 

 consider their psychical qualities, the case is reversed ; language, 

 grammar, religion, and everything related to anything written 

 develops independently of the numerical relation existing between 

 the immigrants and the old population; the decisive factor is 

 ability and absolute superiority. The victory will be won by the 

 more highly developed language, the more perfect grammar, the 

 more advanced religion, and better writing, wherever there is any 

 question of these things." 



We see then that a change of civilisation brought about by 

 the immigration of another people does not always involve a great 

 alteration in the anthropological characteristics of the original 

 people, race, or nation. 



There is but little to say with regard to the functions of the 

 central and peripheral nervous systems in their entirety ,'owing to 

 the scarcity of reliable data on this subject. The information 

 afforded us by different explorers as to the psychical faculties of 

 various representatives of the human race is undoubtedly of 

 value, but obviously belongs rather to the realm of psychology. 



