44 COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE 



ments of the studies of recent times), a rich source of historical 

 knowledge. They lead us to a distant past to which no tradition 

 reaches. The comparative study of languages shows how widely 

 separated peoples are related with one another and have migrated 

 from a common home. It points out the course of migrations; it 

 recognizes in the greater or less degree of change, in the stability 

 of certain forms or in their advanced decay which people has kept 

 closer to the speech once spoken in the common home." 



No comparative grammarian of to-day would venture to express 

 the relation of linguistic evidence to ethnology in such unqualified 

 terms. The application of linguistic evidence is not as simple as was 

 once believed, it has its limitations, and is not capable alone of laying 

 bare all the events of prehistoric times. Yet I for one do not believe 

 that anything in .our present views of its application has actually 

 diminished its importance. Whatever value we attach to other factors, 

 it remains true that language furnishes the most tangible evidence and 

 will always hold the first place in any ethnological discussion. 



It is true, of course, that language is not always a key to race. 

 History furnishes numerous examples of the adoption by one people 

 of the language of another, -whether it be the speech of the conquerors 

 or the conquered that survives, and there is no reason to doubt that 

 this was equally frequent in prehistoric times. Hence the fallibility 

 of assuming community of race from community of language. Yet 

 the warning against the confusion of language and people is uttered 

 so vigorously, we are so emphatically admonished of the absurdity 

 of speaking, for example, of Indo-European or Aryan peoples^ that 

 I believe there is nowadays more danger of underestimating than 

 of overestimating the historical bearing of linguistic evidence. It is 

 still a truism that language implies a people speaking it. Even in 

 those cases where a people has changed its language, this has been 

 effected only by mixture with another people. If this other people 

 whose language becomes dominant is numerically stronger than the 

 people whose language is lost, then kinship with peoples of related 

 languages will be true of the larger contingent of the resulting mixed 

 people. And if the people whose language becomes dominant is 

 numerically weaker, this is in itself proof that it is intellectually 

 stronger, superior in civilization and organization, so that kinship 

 with peoples of related languages will still be true of what is the 

 more important contingent in the mixed people. The mere phys- 

 ical domination of a small body of invaders, forming only the ruling 

 class, is not sufficient to impose their language upon the masses. 

 Witness the fate of the Franks or the Normans in France, the Swedish 

 rulers of Russia, the Turkish Bulgarians, the Manchus in China. 

 If the Romans in Gaul, in spite of their numerical inferiority, imposed 



