456 



NA TURE 



[September 8, 1892 



distance must be made greater still if the building in which the 

 instrument is placed is fitted with a system of iron pipes. Minor 

 galvanometers must use iron shields and artificial fields, while 

 earth indicators and other similar methods of finding the con- 

 stant of a ballistic galvanometer must be abandoned. Experi- 

 ments are under way for providing the thinnest shield of soft iion 

 which will serve as complete protection to magnetic instruments 

 under such conditions as just mentioned," 



The preliminary meetings of affiliated societies drew off much 

 material which would otherwise have been presented to the 

 chemical and zoological sections. 



Prof. Robert T. Hill read to the geological section a paper on 

 "The Volcanic Craters of the United States," in which he 

 said : — "At the present moment, when many of the great vol- 

 canoes of the world are in activity, Vesuvius and Etna in 

 Europe, others in the Australian region, and Colima in Mexico, 

 I thought it a good idea to review the many beautiful volcanic 

 craters found in our own land. The great cinder cones of New 

 Mexico, Arizona, California, and Oregon are among the most 

 interesting. The most eastern crater in the United States is 

 Mount Capulin, a vast mountain in New Mexico. This is com- 

 posed of volcanic cinder, which looks very much like that which 

 comes from a locomotive. It rises 2750 feet above the plain on 

 which it stands. It is twelve miles in circumference at its base. 

 Were it situated in the eastern part of the United States it 

 would be considered one of the greatest objects of natural 

 interest, but in the West, where the phenomena are so abundant, 

 it is hardly noticed and it has not found a place on the maps. 

 In Arizona and New Mexico over 300 old volcanic necks or 

 ' pipes ' are found, and there are 20,000 square miles of lava 

 which has flowed from them. The recent earthquakes in Cali- 

 fornia were shown to have been produced by the terrific volcanic 

 disturbances in Western Mexico." 



Prof. Hill thinks it probable that the extinct volcanoes in the 

 United States may again become active. The volcanic region 

 has only been known about fifty years, and experts say that ap- 

 pearances indicate eruptions within two hundred years past. 



The next meeting of the Association will be held at Madison, 

 Wisconsin, on the third Thursday of August, 1893, unless the [ 

 date shall be changed by the council. 



Cordial invitations from the city government of San Fran- 

 cisco, the California Academy of Science, the University of 

 California, and the new and munificently-endowed Leland 

 Stanford, Jun., University, indicate that a meeting at San 

 Francisco will be arranged for 1895. 



THE INTERNA TIONAL CONGRESS OF 

 ORIENTALISTS. 



T^HE meetings of the International Congress of Orientalists 

 are being held this week in London, and the proceedings, 

 which are of great interest, have been attracting a good deal of 

 popular attention. The Congress is being attended not only by 

 a large number of British scholars, but by many representatives 

 of other countries, among whom are the following : — Austria- 

 Hungary : Prof. G. Buhler, the Rev. Joseph Dahlmann, Dr. I. 

 Goldziher, Dr. J: Karabacek, Prof I,. Reinisch ; Belgium : 

 Dr. Abbeloos ; Egypt : Dr. VoUers ; France : Prof J. Darme- 

 steter ; Germany : Prof. K. Abel, Prof. R. E. Brunnow, Prof. 

 Geiger, Prof. Hommel, Prof Hubschmann, Dr. G. Huth, Prof. 

 Kautzsch, Prof. Kielhorn, Prof. Leumann ; Holland : Prof. J. 

 P. N. Land ; Italy : Prof Ascoli, Dr. Carlo Formichi, Count 

 Angelo de Gubernatis, Dr. Pavolini ; Sweden and Norway : 

 Dr. Karl Piehl ; United States of America : Prof. Charles Lan- 

 man, Mr. W. H. Ward. 



_ At the opening meeting on Monday, Prof. Max Miiller de- 

 livered his presidential address. After some preliminary observa- 

 tions, in the course of which he expressed the obligations of the 

 Congress to the Duke of York for having consented to act as 

 honorary president. Prof. Miiller spoke of the splendid service 

 which has been rendered by Oriental scholarship in proving that in 

 prehistoric times language formed a bond of wqion between the 

 ancestors of many of the Eastern and Westein nations, and that 

 in historic times also, language, which seemed to separate the 

 great nations of antiquity, never separated the most important 

 among them so completely as to make all intellectual commerce 

 and exchange between them impossible. These two discoveries 

 seemed to him to form the highest glory of Oriental scholarship 



NO. II 93, VOL. 46] 



during the present century. It was often supposed that students 

 of Oriental languages and of the science of language dealt with 

 words only. Even now, when scholars spoke of languages and 

 families of languages, they often forgot that languages meant 

 speakers of languages, and that families of speech presupposed 

 real families, or classes, or powerful confederacies which 

 have struggled for their existence and held their ground against 

 all enemies. "Languages," said Prof Miiller, "as we 

 read in the book of Daniel, are the same as nations that dwell 

 on all the earth. If therefore Greeks and Romans, Cells, Ger- 

 mans, Slavs, Persians, and Indians, speaking different languages, 

 and each forming a separate nationality, constitute, as long as 

 we know them, a real historical fact, there is another face equally 

 real and historical, though we may refer it to a prehistoric period, 

 namely, that there was a time when the ancestors of all these 

 nations and languages formed one compact body, speaking one 

 and the same language, a language so real, so truly historical, 

 that without it there would never have been a real Greek, a real 

 Latin language, never a Greek Republic, never a Roman 

 Empire ; there would have been no Sanskrit, no Vedas, no 

 Avesta, no Plato, no Greek New Testament. We know with 

 the same certainty that other nations and languages also, which 

 in historical times stand before us so isolated as Phenician, 

 Hebrew, Babylonian, and Arabic, presuppose a prehistoric, 

 that is, an antecedent powerful Semitic confederacy, held to- 

 gether by the bonds of a common language, possibly by the 

 same laws and by a belief in the same gods. Unless the an- 

 cestors of these nations and languages had once lived and worked 

 together, there would have been no common arsenal from which 

 the leading nations of Semitic history could have taken their 

 armour and their swords, the armour and swords which they 

 wielded in their intellectual struggles, and many of which we 

 are still wielding ourselves in our wars of liberation from error, 

 and our conquests of truth." 



With regard to the question as to the exact part of the world 

 where these consolidations took place, no definite or positive 

 statement could be made. Nothing, however, had shaken his 

 belief — he did not call it more — that the oldest home of the 

 Aryas was in the East. All theories in favour of other localities, 

 of which so much had been said lately, whether in favour of 

 Scandinavia, Russia, or Germany, rested on evidence far more 

 precarious than that which was collected by the founders of 

 comparative philology. Tnere was also a difference of opinion 

 as to the original home of the Semites, but all Semitic scholars 

 agreed that it was "somewhere in Asia." With regard to time 

 the difficulties were still greater ; but Prof Miiller expressed the 

 opinion that if we must follow the example of geology and fix 

 chronological limits for the growth of the Proto- Aryan language, 

 previous to the consolidation of the six national languages, 

 10,000 B.C. would by no means be too distant as the probable 

 limit of what he would call our historical knowledge of the 

 existence of Aryan speakers somewhere in Asia. There must 

 also have been a long period previous to the formation of the 

 great Semitic languages, because thus only can the fact be 

 accounted for that on many points so modern a language as 

 Arabic is more primitive than Hebrew, while in other gram- 

 matical formations Hebrew is more primitive than Arabic. 

 Whether it was possible that these two linguistic consolidations, 

 the Aryan and Semitic, came originally from a common source was 

 a question which scholars did not like to ask, because they 

 knew it did not admit of a scholarlike answer. Another ques- 

 tion also which carried us back still further into unknown anti- 

 quity, whether it was possible to account for the origin of 

 languages or rather of human speech in general, was one which 

 scholars eschewed, because it was one to be handled by philoso- 

 phers rather than by students of language. The deeper we 

 delved the farther the solution of this problem seemed to recede 

 from our grasp ; and we might here too learn the old lesson that 

 our mind was not made to grasp beginnings. And yet, though, 

 accepting this limitation of their labours as the common fate of 

 all human knowledge. Oriental scholars had not altogether 

 laboured in vain. No history of the world could in future be 

 written without its introductory chapter on the great consolida- 

 tions of the ancient Aryan and Semitic speakers. It might be 

 said that this great discovery of a whole act in the drama of the 

 world, the very existence of which was unknown to our fore- 

 fathers, was due to the study of the Science of Language 

 rather than to Oriental scholarship. But where would the 

 Science of Language have been without the students of 

 Sanskrit and Zend, of Hebrew and Arabic? "At a 



