144 SYSTEM. 



cal configuration.* This is also the opinion of Humboldtf 

 and M. Vivien. J A language, like every custom, and every 

 act of individual relation, can transmit itself from one race to 

 another which is very different. The unity of a family of lan- 

 guages is not always sufficient to establish that the people who 

 speak these idioms are of one and the same origin ; we can 

 only conclude from it that they have been in relation one with 

 the other, and it is even reasonable to admit that this cause has 

 been able to act with a decisive influence at the epoch when 

 man first commenced to lisp. These two tribes meeting for the 

 first time, physically strangers one to the other, were doubt- 

 less able to borrow mutually certain habits, and to mingle in a 

 decided manner their two manners of explaining their thoughts, 

 from which has resulted one sole language, in which we cannot 

 distinguish except by analysis the two different branches which 

 have contributed to its formation. This hypothesis has been 

 even elevated to a general thesis by several philologists, and 

 M. d'Escayrac de Lauture, among others, believes that the 

 centre of Africa, that land of the unknown and of mystery, 

 is reserved to us as a spectacle of this phenomenon. || Without 

 going back to origin, it is evident that two neighbouring 

 peoples, in continual relation one with the other, ought to end 

 by borrowing mutually the forms of language, letters, and arti- 

 culation, especially when they have neither of them any litera- 



* Bunsen (Eng. transl.), Niebuhr's Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 39. 



f " Languages," he says, " give but feeble probabilities in Anthropology." 

 Voyage aux regions Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, vol. iii, p. 352. 



J See, in the Memoires de la Socir'te Ethnologique (July 1843), a letter in 

 which M. Vivien denies a first rank to language as a distinctive characteristic, 

 and gives it to physical type. 



See above, p. 32. 



|| "I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this philological barba- 

 rism is permitted me) do not resemble one another because they come from 

 the same parent, but because they have been brought up together; Africa 

 especially seems to me to furnish a proof of it, for we must study the history 

 of families of languages, especially in the place where they began to be 

 formed, and I believe that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is 

 not applicable to all cases, but to several ; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish, 

 etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death ; but many other lan- 

 guages appear to me to take their features one from the other by simple 

 frequentation, by the natives being often in company together, and, as time 

 goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages, like the branches 

 of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not exist." Correspondence, 

 1857. 



