TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 789 



That we speak at all may rightly be called a work of nature, o^pera naturale, as 

 Dante said long ago ; but that we speak thus or thus, cost o cost, that, as the same 

 Dante said, depends on our pleasure — that is, our work. To imagine, therefore, 

 that as a matter of necessity, or as a matter of fact, dolichocephalic skulls have 

 anything to do with Aryan, mesocephalic with Semitic, or brachycephalic with 

 Turanian speech, is nothing but the wildest random thought ; it can convey no 

 rational meaning whatever. We might as well say that all painters are dolicho- 

 cephalic, and all musicians brachycephalic, or that all lophocomic ti-ibes work in 

 gold, and all lissocomic tribes in silver. 



If anything must be ascribed to prehistoric times, surely the differentiation of 

 the human skull, the human hair, and the human skin, would have to be ascribed 

 to that distant period. No one, I believe, has ever maintained that a mesocephalic 

 skull was split or differentiated into a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic variety 

 in the bright sunshine of history. 



But let us, for the sake of argument, assume that in prehistoric times all doli- 

 chocephalic people spoke Aryan, all mesocephalic, Semitic, all brachycephalic, 

 Turanian languages; how would that help us.'' 



So long as we know anything of the ancient Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian 

 languages, we find foreign words in each of them. This proves a very close and 

 historical contact between them. For instance, in Babylonian texts of 3000 B.C. 

 there is the word sindhu for cloth made of vegetable fibres, liuen. That can only 

 be the Sk. sindhu, the Indus, or saindhava, what comes from the Indus. It would 

 be the same word as the Homeric crivbaiv, fine cloth. ^ In Egyptian we find so 

 many Semitic words that it is difficult to say whether they were borrowed or 

 derived from a common source. I confess I am not convinced, but Egyptologists 

 of high authority assure us that the names of several Aryan peoples, such as the 

 Sicilians and Sardinians, occur in the fourteenth century B.C., in the inscriptions of 

 the time of Menephthah I. Again, as soon as we know anything of the Turanian 

 languages — Finnish, for instance — we find them full of Aryan words. All this, it 

 may be said, applies to a very recent period in the ancient history of humanity. 

 Still, we have no access to earlier documents, and we may fairly say that this close 

 contact which existed then existed, probably, at an earlier time also. 



If, then, we have no reason to doubt that the ancestors of the people speaking 

 Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian languages lived in close proximity, would there not 

 have been marriages between them, so long as they lived in peace, and would they 

 not have killed the men and carried off the women in time of war F What, then, 

 would have been the effect of a marriage between a dolichocephalic mother and a 

 brachycephalic father ? The materials for studying this question of metissaf/e, as 

 the French call it, are too scanty as yet to enable us to speak with confidence. 

 But whether the paternal or the maternal type prevailed, or whether their union 

 gave rise to a new permanent variety, still it stands to reason that the children of 

 a dolichocephalic captive woman might be found, after fifty or sixty years, speak- 

 ing the language of the brachycephalic conquerors. 



It has been the custom to speak of the early Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian 

 races as large swarms — as millions pouring from one country into another. It has 

 been calculated that these early nomads would have required immense tracts of 

 meadow land to keep their flocks, and that it was the search of new pastures that 

 drove them, by an irresistible force, over the whole inhabitable earth. 



This may have been so, but it may also have not been so. Anyhow, we have 

 a right to suppose that, before there were millions of human beings, there were at 

 first a few only. We have been told of late that there never was a first man ; but 

 we may be allowed to suppose, at all events, that there were at one time a few 

 first men and a few first women. If, then, the mixture of blood by marriage and 

 the mixture of language in peace or war took place at that early time, when the 

 world was peopled by some individuals, or by some hundreds, or by some thousands 

 only, think only what tlie necessary result would have been. It has been calcu- 

 lated that it would require only 600 years to populate the whole earth with the 



' Physical Religion, p. 87. 



