July 12, 1889.] 



SCIENCE. 



sibly being less endowed, the Indian, despite all, had progressed an 

 immense distance towards civilization ; that the race contained all 

 the capabilities for a further advance and for achieving a civiliza- 

 tion of its own, differing, it may be, markedly from our own, as 

 other civilizations differ, but still containing within itself all the es- 

 sentials of that wonderfully complex thing called civilization. Such, 

 at least, is the lesson evolution teaches. 



Hardly had the new land been discovered when the question 

 arose. Who are the Indians, and where did they come from.' 

 Naturally enough, the Indian had his own answers to these ques- 

 tions. It may almost be said, as many tribes, so many origins. A 

 large number of tribes claim to have originated in the localities 

 where they were first found by Europeans, where they emerged 

 from the ground or came from the recesses of some neighboring 

 mountain. Somewhat more poetical is the idea of the Aht of 

 Vancouver Island, who allege that animals were first created at 

 Cape Flattery, and from the union of these with a star that fell 

 from the skies resulted the first men, their ancestors. Puerile 

 these answers certainly are, yet who will maintain that they are 

 more so than the theories of origin held by the Greeks and other 

 classical peoples ? 



Who, then, are the American aborigines .' For Columbus and 

 his followers there was but one answer to the question. As he 

 had reached the eastern shores of India, the people must be Indians, 

 and his error is perpetuated to-day in the name. Later, when the 

 newly discovered country was found to be not an old, but a new 

 continent, the question of the origin and consanguinity of the In- 

 dians was renewed. So strongly tinged with religious thought 

 was the philosophy of the day, that biblical sources were naturally 

 first appealed to, to solve the knotty problem. As mankind was 

 supposed to have originated in Asia, and as all but the ten lost 

 tribes were accounted for, they were rationally appealed to for the 

 origin of the Indian. Perhaps the best exponent of the belief in 

 the Jewish origin of the Indians was Adair, who published his 

 celebrated essay in 1775. 



There is a theory of origin to suit the tastes of all. If you have 

 a special bias or predilection, you have only to choose for yourself. 

 If there be any among you who decline to find the ancestors of our 

 Indians among the Jews, Phosnicians, Scandinavians, Irish, Welsh, 

 Carthaginians, Egyptians, or Tatars, then you still have a choice 

 among the Hindu, Malay, Polynesians, Chinese, or Japanese, or, 

 indeed, among almost any other of the children of men. 



Preposterous as may seem many of the theories above alluded to, 

 nearly all of them rest upon a certain basis of fact and comparison. 

 Many, at least, of the similarities of thought, custom, methods, arts, 

 religions, and myths from which the theories are deduced indeed 

 exist, though false analogies permeate them all. The thread of 

 fact which sustains the theories is, moreover, far too slender to 

 bear the weight put upon it. Erroneous hypotheses like the above 

 have, however, been productive of great good in pointing out and 

 emphasizing some of the most useful lessons which the student of 

 anthropology of the present day must learn and ever keep in mind. 

 Of these, perhaps the most important is that the human mind is 

 everywhere practically the same ; that in a similar state of culture, 

 man, in groping his way along, will ever seek the same or similar 

 means to a desired end ; that, granting the same conditions of en- 

 vironment, man acts upon them, and is acted upon by them, in 

 the same way the world over : hence in large part arise those 

 similarities of customs, beliefs, religions, and arts, which have been 

 appealed to as evidences of genetic connection or of common origin, 

 when in fact they are evidences of nothing but of a common hu- 

 manity. 



Likewise up to the present time the attempts to classify mankind 

 by his physical characters have produced discordant results, and 

 little dependence is to be placed upon the results themselves or 

 upon the theories arising therefrom which^relate to the more pro- 

 found question of the origin of races. In turning to the test of lan- 

 guage, if doubt and uncertainty were left behind, and harmony and 

 agreement took the place of discordant views, we might count our- 

 selves fortunate indeed. Yet, though still in its infancy as regards 

 future possibilities, and while it needs and welcomes the aid of all 

 the other sciences to solve the complex questions which come prop- 

 erly within its domain, it is unquestionably our best guide in prob- 



lems relating to the origin and relationship of the races of man- 

 kind. 



The evolution theory sees evidences of growth and development 

 in every language spoken by man. Comparing the languages of 

 highly civilized peoples with those of lower culture, it finds in the 

 latter evidences of the successive stages through which all lan- 

 guages have necessarily passed in their upward growth. It notes 

 the fact that among lower peoples languages are less and less 

 highly organized, and that among them signs are much more freely 

 used than among the higher ; that the sign-language is capable of 

 a development among savage peoples and mutes so wonderful as 

 to be the medium of all classes of ideas ; and, noting these, it is 

 prepared to believe, though it has not yet proved, that there was a 

 time in the dawn of the human race when organized vocal speech 

 was unknown, and when the fingers, the facial expression, and the 

 postures of the body, were the chief if not the sole means possessed 

 by man to communicate to his fellows his simple wants and 

 ideas. 



Before proceeding further, let us glance briefly at some of the 

 methods employed by linguistic students in their efforts to unlock 

 the mysteries of linguistic relationship. How the comparative 

 study of language is to be carried on, linguistic students are well 

 agreed. Since language is made up of words, each word being 

 the sign of a thought, the science of linguistics is largely the study 

 of words : in other words, it is the tracing word genealogies by 

 means of their etymology. By stripping words of the accretions 

 they have received in the process of time, they may be resolved 

 into roots ; and by the comparison of these roots the philologist 

 obtains proof of relationship, and classifies languages into linguistic 

 families. 



It may be well at this point to define clearly what linguists mean 

 by a linguistic family. A linguistic family is a group of languages 

 which have sprung from a common parent language. The first 

 requisite of a linguistic family, therefore, is that the languages com- 

 posing it shall be related genetically ; the second, that they shall 

 not be related to the languages of any other family. Each family 

 thus consists of a group of languages wholly disconnected from all 

 other families. The chief danger to the student in dealing with 

 such material is to mistake apparent for real resemblances, and to 

 be led to present false word analogies as evidences of true genetic 

 relationship. 



That linguistic science is competent to deal with problems of 

 great magnitude and intricacy, and that there are students who 

 are capable of applying its varied resources, best appears in the 

 grand achievements which concern the group of languages known 

 as the Aryan or Indo-European family, in which our own English 

 tongue takes a prominent if not the first place. It is almost wholly 

 as the result of linguistic studies that the component members of 

 the large and important Aryan family are now recognized, and the 

 history of its earlier members reconstructed to a remarkable de- 

 gree. The family contains eight groups of distinct languages. 

 Among many others, the family includes as offspring from one 

 source Sanscrit, Hindu, Romany or Gypsy, Persian, Armenian, 

 Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scotch, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, 

 Portuguese, Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Servian, Polish, 

 German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and many 

 others. Though one of the largest, and, by reason of its history 

 and the prominent part it has played in the civilization of the 

 world, the most important, the Aryan family is only one of many 

 linguistic families, each one of which is made up in the same way 

 of a greater or less number of related languages. Such are the 

 Bushman and Hottentot of Africa, the Semitic of Asia and Africa, 

 the Chinese, Australian, and many others. The related languages 

 which make up linguistic families vary indefinitely in the amount 

 of likeness they bear to each other. They are often so much un- 

 like, that those who speak them cannot understand each other ; as, 

 for instance, English, German, and French. Though these lan- 

 guages are mutually unintelligible, yet they contain many words of 

 nearly identical form, while other members of the Aryan family 

 have in process of time become so unlike affiliated tongues that it 

 requires the most critical study to detect their relationship. As 

 languages are the principal divisions of a linguistic family, so dia- 

 lects are the subordinate divisions of a language. Family, Ian- 



