THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 127 



occurred, General Grant would, in all likelihood, have lived and died 

 an industrious tanner in an obscure Illinois town, utterly unconscious 

 ■of the powers which were destined to make him one of the most 

 famous commanders of modern times. If the Aryan race had been 

 so unfortunate as to make its first ajjpearance on the shores of the St. 

 Lawrence, or on the western prairies, or amid the uplands of Oregon 

 — possessing no domestic animal but the dog, no cereal but maize — 

 surrounded not by civilized nations like the Accadians, tlie Assyrians, 

 the Phcenicians, the Egyptians and the Chinese, qualified to teach it 

 architecture, astronomy, the alphabet, the smelting of metals, ship- 

 building, the use of the mariner's compass, but by wandering hordes 

 of hostile savages — we have no ground for supposing that this race, 

 Avhatever might be its natural endowments, would have attained any 

 height in culture beyond that which was reached by the most capable 

 American tribes, whose ill-fortune placed them in that hopeless posi- 

 tion. 



This is a point which, in its connection with our thesis, requires 

 some further consideration. The doctrine of evolution, whose import- 

 ance I would in no way depreciate, has, in reference to the intellectual 

 powers of the human race, been strangely misapplied, to such an extent 

 as to lead to serious errors. The misapplication, it must be said, 

 began with Darwin himself ; but he, with that noble ciindor which 

 distinguished him, admitted and corrected the mistake, in which some 

 of his followers still persist. We know how frankly and fully, near 

 the close of his life, he withdrew, on better information, the opinion 

 which he had originally expressed of the low intellectual and moral 

 character of the Fuegians. By just implication, this reversal of his 

 opinion will apply to all savages — for the Fuegians have always been 

 ranked among the lowest of the low. On further consideration, it 

 becomes apparent that this final judgment of the great investigator 

 of nature was in strict accordance with the law of evolution. It is 

 certain that there has been, from one geological age to another, a 

 steady though somewhat irregular increase in the size and complexity 

 of the brains of vertebrate animals. But this increase appears to 

 occur in the transition from one species to another. When a species 

 is once established, there is no evidence (as I am assured by high 

 zoological authority) to show that any material change in the quantity 



