142 SYSTEM, 



penetrate into any foreign literature, it becomes a labour and 

 a fatigue, we only reach it by making an abstraction of our 

 thoughts and our ideas, by endeavouring to enter entirely, by 

 a violent effort, into the life and feelings of another people. 



Languages also have been considered capable of serving as 

 a basis for the classification of the human race. Their im- 

 portance has been largely discussed, and counts numerous 

 warm partisans.* At their head we may perhaps mention 

 Latham, who wishes the ancient history of mankind to be 

 studied by languages, f and agreeing in Prichard's ideas about 

 the production of intermediary hybrid races, he only sees this 

 method of reading the history of the past, and he is quite 

 naturally led to language, which seems to him to offer better 

 conditions of resistance J than physical characteristics. 



It is true that philology, applied to anthropological research, 

 is of immense assistance to it; it can give us powerful in- 

 ductions on the history of the past, and on the origin of the 

 present human species. But even these solutions agree very 

 well with the theory of gradual evolution, and with the co- 

 rollary of this theory, namely, that man has not always pos- 

 sessed the faculty of speech. Philologists tell us, for instance, 



* " Philology is at once the most elevated and the most positive branch of 

 the natural history of the human race." Chavee, Noise et les Langues (La 

 Revue). M. Flourens seems to give philological a superior rank to physical 

 characteristics. [See above, p. 77, note. EDITOR.] 



f He believes that by their means we can go back to the most distant geo- 

 logical periods. See Apophthegms (Edinburgh New Philosophical Journ., vol. li.) 



J Latham thus explains it : " This is because whilst A and B, in the way 

 of stock -blood or pedigree, will give c a true tertium quid, or a near approach 

 to it, and A and B, in the way of language, will only give themselves, i. e., 

 they will give no true tertium quid, nor any very close approach to it." Celtic 

 Nations, p. 33. We have endeavoured to prove that this true tertium quid 

 this real mean term, is never produced as far as species. 



[" Either language must have been originally revealed from heaven, or 

 it must be the fruits of human industry. The greater part of Jews and 

 Christians, and even some of the wisest Pagans, have embraced the former 

 opinion, which seems to be supported by the authority of Moses, who repre- 

 sents the Supreme Being as teaching our first parents the names of animals. 

 The latter opinion is held by Diodorus Siculus, Lucretius, Horace, and many 

 other Greek and Roman writers, who consider language as one of the arts 

 invented by man. The first men, say they, lived for some time in woods and 

 caves, after the manner of beasts, . uttering only confused and indistinct 

 noises, till, associating for mutual assistance, they came by degrees to use 

 articulate sounds mutually agreed upon, for the arbitrary signs or marks of 

 those ideas in the mind of the speaker which he wanted to communicate to 

 the heaver. This opinion sprung from the atomic cosmogony which was 



