644 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIII. No. 591. 



Indo-European philology. The forms of 

 the Indian langiaages differ enormously. 

 It is often assumed that there is one type 

 of American language, but even a super- 

 ficial knowledge of representative dialects 

 of American stocks shows that much great- 

 er than their similarities are their differ- 

 ences, and that the psychological basis of 

 morphology is not by any means the same 

 in the fifty-five stocks that occur on our 

 continent. The scientific problems which 

 are involved in their study have hardly 

 been touched. I must say with regret that 

 the anthropologist of the present day is 

 not the man to solve these problems; that 

 we require not only the stimulating ex- 

 ample of philologists, but also their assist- 

 ance. Tou must give preliminary training 

 to the men who are to take up the prob- 

 lems of American languages; because the 

 centuries of experience and of labor that 

 have been bestowed upon the development 

 of philological methods have given you the 

 advantage of settled lines of approach of 

 linguistic problems. If you are willing 

 to lend us your assistance in this important 

 investigation, I foresee a field of important 

 discoveries which will in their turn be of 

 great benefit to the science of language. 

 The psychological foundation and morpho- 

 logical development of American languages 

 are so peculiar that their study must be a 

 revelation to the student of Indo-European 

 or of Semitic languages. Well-known 

 problems which you have discussed for 

 years appear in new aspects, and broad 

 points of view for discussion of linguistic 

 questions present themselves readily to the 

 student who takes up the types of lan- 

 guage peculiar to our continent. 



I beg to be allowed to make the direct 

 appeal to you here, asking you to turn the 

 attention of your younger students to this 

 promising field. It is virgin soil, and he 

 who takes up the subject with a fairly ade- 

 quate equipment is sure to find most ample 



compensation for his toil in new and val- 

 uable discoveries. Without your help we 

 shall never be able to solve this task, which 

 requires the speediest attention and the 

 cooperation of many investigators. 



When we once have the equipment such 

 as I have tried to outline, when we have 

 investigators who collect the material in 

 authentic form, and when we have students 

 who will apply themselves to a painstaking 

 analysis of the collected data, our problems 

 will probably appear in entirely new light. 

 The connection between prehistoric archeol- 

 ogy and modern ethnology will necessarily 

 become of the same character as the rela- 

 tion between early classical archeology and 

 the study of classical literature. It is true 

 our problems will always remain more ob- 

 scure and more difficult than yours, because 

 we have no historical documents that carry 

 us back through any considerable length of 

 time, while, by the necessities of the case, 

 we are compelled to use, instead of his- 

 torical methods, geographical methods. 

 We have to trace historical transmission 

 and historical contact by studies of geo- 

 graphical distribution. Often we find our- 

 selves confronted by contradictory evi- 

 dence, but, notwithstanding all these diffi- 

 culties, the little progress that has been 

 made during the last twenty years indi- 

 cates plainly that, from this point of view, 

 the historical problem of anthropology may 

 be approached with the hope of a certain 

 amount of success and that we may be able 

 to reconstruct important historical facts. 



I have given expression here to the grow- 

 ing need of the introduction of sounder 

 philological methods of collection and of 

 historical methods in the treatment of an- 

 thropological problems. I do not wish to 

 be understood as advocating a dissociation 

 of anthropology from psychology and the 

 natural sciences. The source from which 

 modern anthropology has grown up, the 

 problems that have presented themselves to 



