480 



OEIGIN AND DISTEIEUTION OE MAN. 



[Cn. XLIII. 



Avould long be regarded as 



a 



QTammatical construction and rich in abstract terms. 



sacred, and there would be 

 reluctance to use a new substance in religious ceremonies.' ^ 

 Some have wished to found an argument in favour of the 

 superior mental endowments of the earliest races of mankind 

 by pointing out that the Sanscrit, and some other of the 

 most ancient languages of Asia, are very artificial in their 



But 

 the nations speaking these tongues will be regarded by every 



geologist as modern when compared to the men of the Paleo- 



In tracing back the course of human CA^ents we 

 should first find a period when scattered migratory hordes 

 in the hunter state were spreading over Asia, and then a still 

 anterior period when one small area of land (possibly now in 

 great part submerged in the Indian or Pacific oceans) con- 

 tained the primitive stock from which they all have ramified, 

 and we may be sure, if the theory of Transmutation be true, 

 that such progenitors of mankind had a scantier vocabulary 

 than the humblest savage knovvai to us. They would have 

 been unable to count as far as the fingers on one hand, and 



lithic age. 



vfould not have invented 

 abstract idea. When the first 



a single 



term expressive of an 

 emigrants were spreading 



over a wide continent, they would separate into small com- 

 munities, each of which would gradually acquire a language 



of its own, but as often as one tribe became more powerful 

 than its neighbours, it would conquer them and absorb into 

 itself those who were not exterminated, imposing its lan- 

 guage on the conquered, yet sometimes borrowing from them 

 some terms and expressions. It is found that the number of 

 independent languages spoken in a continuous tract of land 



in proportion to the barbarism of the natives. 

 Dominant tribes, as they multiply and advance in civilisation 

 and poAver, spread a single language over a vast area. The 

 Chinese for example, several thousand years before our time, 

 constituting as they still do a third of the population of the 

 globe, imposed on nearly the whole of their empire one lan- 

 guage, though diverging, it is true, into many dialects. How 

 long a time it required for one race thus to obtain supremacy 



IS 



great 



I 



I 



f- 



I 



i 



1 



* Oil the Early Condition of Man, Sir Jolui Lubbock. British Assoc. 1867. 



-0. 



i 



