382 bepoet— 1879. 



framed on the assumption of past time immense in length. In fact, one reason why 

 the latter sciences grew so slowly till almost our own day, was their being shackled 

 by the bonds of a short chronology, allowing no room for the long successive 

 periods through which it is now clear that the earth with its plants and animals 

 passed into their present state. Even the Science of Man, though concerned with 

 the later forms of being, belonging to times which geologists treat as almost 

 modern, has nevertheless to deal with periods of time extending far back beyond 

 the range of history and chronology. 



Looking back 4,000 to 5,000 years, what is the appearance of mankind as dis- 

 closed to us by the Egyptian monuments and inscriptions ? Several of the best- 

 marked races of man were already in existence, including the brown Egyptian 

 himself, the dark-white Semitic man of Assyria or Palestine, the Central African 

 of two varieties, which travellers still find as distinct as ever, namely, the black or 

 Negro proper, and the copper-coloured negroid, like the Bongo or Nyam-nyam of 

 our own time. Indeed, the evidence accessible as to ancient races of man goes to 

 prove that the causes which brought about their differences in types of skull, hair, 

 skin, and constitution, did their chief work in times before history began. Since 

 then the races which had become adapted to their geographical regions may have, 

 on the whole, undergone little change while remaining there, but some alterations 

 are traced as due to migration into new climates. Even these are difficult to follow, 

 masked as they are by the more striking changes produced by intermarriage of 

 races. Now the view that the races of man are to be accounted for as varied 

 descendants of one original stock is zoologically probable from the close resemblance 

 of all men in body and mind, and the freedom with which races intercross. If it 

 was so, then the fact of the different races already existing early in the historical 

 period compels the naturalist to look to a prse-historic period for their development 

 to have taken place in. And considering how strongly differenced are the Negro 

 and the Syrian, and how slowly such changes of complexion and feature take place 

 within historical experience, this prse-historic period was probably of vast length. 

 The evidence from the languages of the world points in the same direction. In 

 times of ancient history we already meet with families of languages, such as the 

 Aryan and the Semitic, and as later history goes on many other families of lan- 

 guage come into view, such as the Bantu or Kafir of Africa, the Dravidian of South 

 India, the Malay o-Polynesian, the Algonquiu of North America, and other families. 

 But what we do not find is the parent language of any of these families, the original 

 language which all the other members are dialects of, so that this parent tongue 

 should stand towards the rest in the relation which Latin holds to its descendants, 

 Italian and French. It is, however, possible to work back by the method of philo- 

 logical comparison, so as to sketch the outlines of that early Aryan tongue which 

 must have existed to produce Sanskrit and Persian, Greek and Latin, German, 

 Russian, and Welsh, or the outlines of that early Semitic tongue which must have 

 existed to produce Assyrian, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic. Though such theo- 

 retical reconstructions of parent languages from their descendants may only show a 

 vague and shadowy likeness to the reality, they give some idea of it. And what 

 concerns us here is that theoretical early Aryan and Semitic, or other such recon- 

 structed languages, do not bring our minds appreciably nearer to really primitive 

 forms of speech. However far we get back, the signs of development from still 

 earlier stages are there. The roots have mostly settled into forms which no longer 

 show the reasons why they were originally chosen, while the inflexions only in part 

 preserve traces of their original senses, and the whole structure is such as only a long- 

 lost past can account for. To illustrate this important point, let us remember the 

 system of grammatical gender in Greek or German, how irrationally a classification 

 by sex is applied to sexless objects and thoughts, while even the use of a neuter 

 gender fails to set the confusion straight, and sometimes even twists it with a 

 new perversity of its own. Many a German and Frenchman wishes he could 

 follow the example of our English forefathers who, long ago, threw overboard 

 the whole worthless cargo of grammatical gender. But looking at gender in the 

 ancient grammars, it must be remembered that human custom is hardly ever 

 wilfully absurd, its unreasonableness usually arising from loss or confusion of old 

 sense. Thus it can hardly be doubted that the misused grammatical gender 





