78 LIMITATIONS TO THE USE OF ANTHROPOLOGIC DATA, 
The difference between man and the animals most nearly related to 
him in structure is great. The connecting forms are no longer extant. 
This subject of research, therefore, belongs to the paleontologists rather 
than the ethnologists. The biological facts are embraced in the geologi- 
cal record, and this record up to the present time has yielded but scant 
materials to serve in its solution. 
It is known that man, highly differentiated from lower animals in 
morphologic characteristics, existed in early Quaternary and perhaps in 
Pliocene times, and here the discovered record ends. 
LANGUAGE. 
In philology, North America presents the richest field in the world, 
for here is found the greatest number of languages distributed among 
the greatest number of stocks. As the progress of research is neces- 
sarily from the known to the unknown, civilized languages were studied 
by scholars before the languages of savage and barbaric tribes. Again, 
the higher languages are written and are thus immediately accessible. 
For such reasons, chief attention has been given to the most highly 
developed languages. The problems presented to the philologist, in 
the higher languages, cannot be properly solved without a knowledge 
of the lower forms. The linguist studies a language that he may use it 
as an instrument for the interchange of thought; the philologist studies 
a language to use its data in the construction of a philosophy of lan- 
guage. It is in this latter sense that the higher languages are unknown 
until the lower languages are studied, and it is probable that more 
light will be thrown upon the former by a study of the latter than by 
more extended research in the higher. 
The vast field of unwritten languages has been explored but not sur- 
veyed. In a general way it is known that there are many such lan- 
guages, and the geographic distribution of the tribes of men who speak 
them is known, but scholars have just begun the study of the languages. 
That the knowledge of the simple and uncompounded must precede 
the knowledge of the complex and compounded, that the latter may be 
rightly explained, is an axiom well recognized in biology, and it applies 
equally well to philology. Hence any system of philology, as the term 
is here used, made from a survey of the higher languages exclusively, 
will probably be a failure. ‘Which of you by taking thought can add 
one cubit’ unto his stature,” and which of you by taking thought can 
add the antecedent phenomena necessary to an explanation of the lan- 
guage of Plato or of Spencer? 
The study of astronomy, geology, physics, and biology, is in the 
hands of scientific men; objective methods of research are employed 
and metaphysic disquisitions find no place in the accepted philosophies ; 
