952 The American Naturalist. [November, 
There should be no underrating of the great value of Max 
Müllers work. He has built himself an enduring monument in 
his contributions to philology ; but I affirm that his labor has been 
more in the line of polyglot grammar generally. It is no slur 
upon the value or extent of Müllers work to say this, for this 
department of philology is just as capable of being deeply mined 
as any other portion of human knowledge; but Müller has 
missed availing himself of what had been worked out by other 
thinkers. 
That he has become entangled in the mere wordiness of some 
ideas is apparent in his stating that Darwin has shown the 
inappropriateness of the word species, but that he has substituted 
varieties in its stead. Miller admits genera and individuals, but 
neither varieties nor species. Now if there was one thing above 
all others that Darwin did make clear, it was the trashiness of all 
these terms, from genus to variety, when used in the olden fixation 
sense. Nevertheless, in chemistry, botany, zoology, and even 
where the arbitrary relative terms genus, species, and variety are- 
indispensable, nothing is capable of absolute classification ; for 
everything is relative. Even the vertebrates cannot be sharply 
set apart from the invertebrates, for we are compelled to include 
the notochordal animals without backbones among the verte- 
brates. What Darwin did was to show that species, the limbs of 
a tree, were not trunks of separate trees, but that twigs and 
branches were often undistinguishable apart. 
Throughout Max Miiller’s writings he is handicapped by his 
exaggeration of the importance of his particular line of research 
carried on as an isolated study. Could he but have a fair 
knowledge of associated sciences, such as that of anthropology, 
anatomy, physiology, and zoology, the value of his work would 
be greatly’ increased, and his inferences would undergo radical 
changes. He seems to base everything upon the derivation of a 
word, and says that etymology should not be laughed at. 
Undoubtedly a careful study of vocabularies aids us in tracing 
the origin of races, but languages have always been in an eternal 
flux, even though the meaning of words may sometimes show the 
-intention with which words were framed, and in a few instances — 












