EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



ation or two, under the guidance of such ad- 

 venturers as Attila, or Jinghis, or Timur, to 

 become for a brief season the " scourge of God" 

 and the terror of mankind, but ever, as now, 

 incapable of stable political union. With such 

 divergent careers as these, we need not expect 

 to find evidence of linguistic community among 

 the different branches of the yellow race. If we 

 find one set of linguistic phenomena in China, 

 and a totally different set in Japan, and yet 

 another set among the barbarous Mongols and 

 Tunguses, this is no more than we might have 

 expected. We need not expect to find such phe- 

 nomena as the coordinate divergence of French 

 and Italian from a common Latin mother 

 tongue, or of Latin and Sanskrit from a com- 

 mon Aryan mother tongue, except where we 

 can find historical conditions similar to those 

 under which these phenomena were manifested. 

 Outside of that broad stream of history which 

 includes the Aryan and Semitic worlds we do 

 not find such conditions, save in a few sporadic 

 cases. On the contrary, we find just such a 

 state of things as would follow from the isolated 

 independent development of a number of lan- 

 guages, either without any original kinship, or 

 with the original kinship blurred and destroyed 

 almost from the very beginning. 



The last clause introduces us to a considera- 

 tion concerning barbarous languages which is 

 '54 



