vii.] METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 141 



Yet how much philological reasoning in favour of the 

 affinity or diversity of two distinct peoples has been 

 based on the mere comparison of numerals ! 



But the most instructive example of the fallacy 

 which may attach to merely philological reasonings, is 

 that afforded by the Feejeans, who are, physically, so 

 intimately connected with the adjacent Negritos of New 

 Caledonia, &c., that no one can doubt to what stock 

 they belong, and who yet, in the form and substance of 

 their language, are Polynesian. The case is as remark- 

 able as if the Canary Islands should have been found to 

 be inhabited by negroes speaking Arabic, or some other 

 clearly Semitic dialect, as their mother tongue. As it 

 happens, the physical peculiarities of the Feejeans are 

 so striking, and the conditions under which they live 

 are so similar to those of the Polynesians, that no one 

 has ventured to suggest that they are merely modified 

 Polynesians a suggestion which could otherwise cer- 

 tainly have been made. But if languages may be thus 

 transferred from one stock to another, without any 

 corresponding intermixture of blood, what ethnological 

 value has philology ? what security does unity of 

 language afford us that the speakers of that language 

 may not have sprung from two, or three, or a dozen, 

 distinct sources ? 



Thus we come, at last, to the purely zoological method, 

 from which it is not unnatural to expect more than 

 from any other, seeing that, after all, the problems of 

 ethnology are simply those which are presented to the 

 zoologist by every widely distributed animal he studies. 

 The father of modern zoology seems to have had no 

 doubt upon this point. At the twenty-eighth page of 

 the standard twelfth edition of the " Systema Naturae," 

 in fact, we find : 



