792 EEPOET— 1891. 



learning their dialects, collecting their legends, and making a systematic study of 

 their laws, customs, and superstitions. But what does he say in his prefHce ? ' 1 

 haye felt the truth,' he says, ' of what Mr. Fison, late missionary in Fiji, has 

 written : " When a European has been living for two or three years among 

 sayages, he is sure to be fully conyinced that he knows all about them ; when he 

 has been ten years or so amongst them, it he be an obseryant man, he knows that 

 he knows yery little about them, and so begins to learn." ' 



How few of the books in which we trust with regard to the characteristic 

 peculiarities of sayage races have been written by men who haye lived among 

 them for ten or twenty years, and who have learnt their languages till they could 

 speak them as well as the natiyes themselves ! 



It is no excuse to say that any trayeller who has eyes to see and ears to hear 

 can form a correct estimate of the doings and sayings of sayage tribes. It is not 

 so, and anthropologists know from sad experience that it is not so. Suppose a 

 trayeller came to a camp where he saw thousands of men and women dancing 

 round the image of a young bull. Suppose that the dancers were all stark naked, 

 that after a time they began to fight, and that at the end of their orgies there 

 were three thousand corpses hing about weltering in their blood. AVould not a 

 casual traveller have described such sayages as worse than the negroes of Dahomey ? 

 Yet these sayages were really the Jews, the chosen people of God. The image 

 was the golden calf, the prie.st was Aaron, and the chief who ordered the massacre 

 ■was Moses. We may read the 32nd chapter of Exodus in a yery diflerent sense. 

 A traveller who could have conversed with Aaron and Moses might have under- 

 stood the causes of the revolt and the necessity of the massacre. But without 

 this power of interrogation and mutual explanation, no trayeller?, howeyer graphic 

 and amusing their stories may be, can be trusted ; no statements of theirs can be 

 used by the anthropologist for truly scientific pui-poses. 



From the day when this fact was recognised by the highest authorities in 

 Anthropology, and was sanctioned by some at least of our anthropological, ethno- 

 logical, and folk-lore societies, a new epoch began, and Philology receiyed its right 

 place as the handmaid of Anthropology. The most important paragraph in our 

 new charter was this, that in future no one is to be quoted or relied on as an 

 authority on the customs, traditions, and more particularly on the religious ideas 

 of uncivilised races who has not acquired an acquaintance with their language, 

 sufficient to enable him to converse with them freely on these difficult subjects. 



No one would object to this rule when we have to deal with civilised and 

 literary nations. But the languages of Africa, America, Polynesia, and even 

 Australia are now being studied as formerly Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Sanskrit 

 only were studied. You have only to compare the promiscuous descriptions of the 

 Hottentots in the works of the best ethnologists with the researches of a real 

 Hottentot scholar like Dr. Hahn to see the advance that has been made. When 

 we read the books of Bishop Callaway on the Zulu, of William Gill and Edward 

 Tregear on the Polynesians, of Horatio Hale on some of the North American races, 

 we feel at once that we are in safe hands, in the hands of renl scholars. Even then 

 ■we must, of course, remember that their knowledge of the languages cannot com- 

 pare with that of Bentley, or Hermann, or Burnout', or Ewald. Yet we feel that 

 we cannot go altogether wrong in trusting to their guidance. 



I venture to go even a step further, and I believe the time will come when no 

 anthropologist will venture to write on anything concerning the inner life of man 

 without haying himself acquired a knowledge of the language in which that inner 

 life finds its truest expression. 



This may seem to be exacting too much, but you have only to look, for instance, 

 at the descriptions given of the customs, the laws, the legends, and the religious 

 convictions of the people of India about a hundred years ago, and before Sanskrit 

 began to be studied, and you will be amazed at the utter caricature that is often 

 given there of the intellectual state of the Brahmans compared ■with what we 

 know of it now from their own literature. 



And if that is the case with a people like the Indians, who are a civilised race, 

 possessed of an ancient literature, and well within the focus of history for the last 



