June 30, 1892] 



NATURE 



207 



Mr. Horatio Hale's object in the essay before us is to 

 show that language separates man from all other animals 

 by a line as distinct as that which separates a tree from a 

 stone, or a stone from a star. 



" A treatise," he writes, " which should undertake to 

 ■show how inanimate matter became a plant or an animal, 

 would, of course, possess great interest for biologists, but 

 it would not be accepted by them as a treatise on biology. 

 In like manner a work displaying the anatomy of man in 

 ■comparison with that of other animals cannot but be of 

 great value, and a treatise showing how the human frame 

 ■was probably developed from that of a lower animal must 

 be of extreme interest ; but these would be works, not of 

 anthropology, but of physiology or biology. Anthropo- 

 logy begins where mere brute life gives way to something 

 widely different and indefinitely higher. It begins with 

 that endowment which characterizes man, and distin- 

 guishes him from all other creatures. The real basis of 

 the science of anthropology is found in articulate speech, 

 with all that it indicates and embodies." He does not 

 hesitate to maintain that solely by th^ir languages can 

 the tribes of men be scientifically classified, their affilia- 

 tions discovered, and their mental qualities discerned. 

 These premises, he says, compel us to the logical con- 

 clusion that linguistic anthropology is the only " Science 

 of Man." 



These words explain at once the whole character of 

 this important essay. Mr. Horatio Hale is a great ad- 

 mirer of Darwin, but not of the Darwinians. He con- 

 trasts Darwin's discernment of the value of language 

 with the blindness of his followers, who are physiologists 

 and nothing else. Why anthropology has of late been 

 swamped by physiology, Mr. Horatio Hale explains by 

 the fact that the pursuit of the latter science is so infi- 

 nitely the easier. " To measure human bodies and human 

 bones, to compute the comparative number of blue eyes 

 and black eyes in any community, to determine whether 

 the section of a human hair is circular, or oval, or 

 oblong, to study and compare the habits of various tribes 

 of man, as we would study and compare the habits of 

 beavers and bees, these are tasks which are compara- 

 tively simple. But the patient toil and protracted mental 

 -exertion required to penetrate into the mysteries of a 

 strange language, and to acquire a knowledge profound 

 enough to afford the means of determining the intel- 

 lectual endowments of the people who speak it, are such 

 as very few men of science have been willing to undergo." 

 Mr. Horatio Hale has a right to speak with authority on 

 this point, for, besides having studied the several lan- 

 guages of North America, of Australia and Polynesia, 

 no one has more carefully measured skulls, registered 

 eyes, measured hair, and collected antiquities and curio- 

 sities of all kinds than he has done during his long and 

 Ijusy life. His knowledge of the customs of uncivilized 

 races is very considerable. No one knows the Indian 

 tribes and likewise the Australians better than he does,and 

 he is in consequence very severe on mere theorizers who 

 imagine they have proved how the primitive hordes of 

 human beings, after herding together like cattle, emerged 

 slowly through wife-capture, mother-right, father-right, 

 endogamy, exogamy, totemism, fetichism, and clan 

 systems, to what may be called a social status. He 

 holds with Darwin that man was from the beginning a 

 pairing animal, and that the peculiar usages of barbarous 

 tribes are simply the efforts of men, pressed down by 

 hard conditions, below the natural stage, to keep them- 

 selves from sinking lower. He gives a most graphic 

 description of changes of civilization produced by change 

 of surroundings in the case of the savage Athapascans, 

 and their descendants, the quick-witted and inventive 

 Navajos. He holds that the inhabitants of Australia 

 were originally Dravidians, and that their social and 

 linguistic deterioration is due to the miserable character 

 of the island in which they had taken refuge, possibly 



NO. II 83, VOL. 46] 



froni the Aryans, when pressing upon the aboriginal in- 

 habitants of the Dekhan. He points out a few gram- 

 matical terminations in the Dravidian languages which 

 show some similarity to the terminations of Australian 

 dialects. The dative, for instance, is formed in the 

 Dravidian Tulu by ku, and in the Lake Macquarie and 

 Wiradhurei dialects of Australia by ko. In both families 

 the k of ku and ko is liable to be changed into ^. The 

 plural suffix in Tamil '\s gal^ in Wiradhurei ^a/a«. Thus 

 in Tamil waraw, tree, forms the nom. plur. marangal , iht 

 dat. plur. marangalukku ; while in Wiradhurei, bagai, 

 shell, appears in the nom. plur. as bagaigalan, in the 

 dat. plur. as bagaigalan-gu. On this point, however, Mr. 

 Horatio Hale ought to produce fuller evidence, particu- 

 larly from numerals, and the common household words 

 of uncivilized tribes. The pronouns show many coinci- 

 dences with Dravidian and Australian languages. No 

 one is better qualified for that task than he is, for we 

 really owe to him the first trustworthy information about 

 the Australian dialects. He considers all the dialects 

 spoken in Australia as varieties of one original speech, 

 and he has proved their wonderful structure by several 

 specimens contained in his first book, published nearly 

 fifty years ago, and again in this last essay of his. 



There is no doubt that this essay will provoke much 

 opposition, but no one can read it without deriving most 

 valuable information from it, and without being im- 

 pressed with the singularly clear and unbiassed judg- 

 ment of the author. It is to be hoped that if there is 

 any controversy it may be carried on in the same 

 scientific and thoroughly gentlemanlike tone in which Mr. 

 Horatio Hale deals with those whom he has to reprove. 

 Thus, when Prof. Whitney, a fertile writer on linguistic 

 science in America, commits himself to the statement that 

 the Dravidian languages have " a general agglutinative 

 structure with prefixes only" Mr. Horatio Hale good- 

 naturedly remarks, " this is doubtless a misprint for with 

 suffixes ottly.'" And when Prof. Gerland, in his con- 

 tinuation of Waitz's invaluable work " Die Anthropologie 

 der Naturvolker," refers to Mr. Horatio Hale as describing 

 the hair of the Australians as long, fine^ and woolly, he 

 points out that he, on the contrary, described their hair 

 as neither woolly, like that of the Africans and 

 Melanesians ; nor frizzled, like that of the Feejeeans ; nor 

 coarse, stiff, and curHng, as with the Malays ; but as long, 

 fine, and wavy, like that of Europeans. He naturally 

 protests against Prof. Friedrich Miiller charging him 

 with having committed such a blunder, which, as he re- 

 marks, would be as bad as if he had described the 

 Eskimos as having black skins. But there is not a single 

 offensive expression in the whole of his essay, 

 though the opportunities would have been many for 

 adopting the style of hitting indiscriminately above and 

 below the belt. Though he differs from Prof. Whitney, 

 he evidently ranks him very high, and as second only to 

 "that eminent Sanskrit scholar, Sir Monier Monier- 

 WiUiams." 



LEWIS MORRIS RUTHERFURD. 



ON May 30 last there passed away from us one whose 

 name was familiar to many, and who was respected 

 and beloved by all who were fortunate enough to have 

 made his acquaintance. By the death of Lewis Morris 

 Rutherfurd, who died at the age of seventy-six, at his estate 

 inTranquillity,New Jersey,astronomical science especially 

 suffers, for he was one of the pioneers of astronomical 

 photography and spectroscopy, and the introducer of 

 many of the practical methods which have opened to us 

 such a vast field of research. 



Born at Morrisania, New Jersey, on November 25, 

 1816, he first devoted himself to the study of law, but 

 finding his mind bent more on astronomical pursuits. 



