80 LIMITATIONS TO TRE USE OF ANTHROPOLOGIC DATA. 
When one language becomes two, the same function is performed by 
each, and is marked by the fundamental characteristic of multiplica- 
tion, i. e., degradation; for the people originally able to communicate 
with each other can no longer thus communicate; so that two languages 
do not serve as valuable a purpose as one. And, further, neither of the 
two languages has made the progress one would have made, for one 
would have been developed sufficiently to serve all the purposes of the 
united peoples in the larger area inhabited by them, and, ceteris paribus, 
the language spoken by many people scattered over a large area must 
be superior to one spoken by a few people inhabiting a small area. 
It would have been strange, indeed, had the primitive assumption in 
philology been true, and the history of language exhibited universal 
degradation. 
In the remarks on the “Origin of Man,” the statement was made that 
mankind was distributed throughout the habitable earth, in some geo- 
logical period anterior to the present and anterior to the development 
of other than the rudest arts. Here, again, we reach the conclusion that 
man was distributed throughout the earth anterior to the development 
of organized speech. 
Tn the presence of these two great facts, the difficulty of tracing genetic 
relationship among human races through arts, customs, institutions, and 
traditions will appear, for all of these must have been developed after 
the dispersion of mankind. Analogies and homologies in these phe- 
nomena must be accounted for in some other way. Somatology proves 
the unity of the human species; that is, the evidence upon which this 
conclusion is reached is morphologic; but in arts, customs, institutions, 
and traditions abundant corroborative evidence is found. The indi- 
viduals of the one species, though inhabiting diverse climes, speaking 
diverse languages, and organized into diverse communities, have pro- 
gressed in a broad way by the same stages, have had the same arts, cus- 
toms, institutions, and traditions in the same order, limited only by the 
degree of progress to which the several tribes have attained, and modi- 
fied only to a limited extent by variations in environment. 
If any ethnic classification of mankind is to be established more fun- 
damental than that based upon language, it must be upon physical 
characteristics, and such must have been acquired by profound differen- 
tiation anterior to the development of languages, arts, customs, institu- 
tions, and traditions. The classifications hitherto made onthis basis are 
unsatisfactory, and no one now receives wide acceptance. Perhaps 
further research will clear up doubtful matters and give an acceptable 
grouping; or it may be that such research will result only in exhibiting 
the futility of the effort. 
The history of man, from the lowest tribal condition to the highest 
national organization, has been a history of constant and multifarious 
admixture of strains of blood; of admixture, absorption, and destruc- 
tion of languages with general progress toward unity; of the diffusion 
