188 , Report on Philology y etc. 



Moabite stone in 1870, gives us the earliest yet discovered 

 specimen of any Semitic writing and the most primitive 

 form of the alphabet, though even that is evidently de- 

 scended from some still earlier one, and shows traces of 

 divergence from the primitive form which was the com- 

 mon mother of it aud of the other Semitic and Aryan alpha- 

 bets. One of the most attractive features in popular interest 

 at the meetings of the department of anthropology of the 

 late Brighton meeting of the British Association, was the 

 exhibition by Mr. Evans of a series of charts showing the 

 successive changes in alphabetical characters from the origi- 

 nal hieroglyphs in the form of an ox, a house, a camel, a 

 door, etc., to the form of letter as indicated by modern 

 printer's types. 



Monsieur Quetelet has shown by careful compilation of 

 statistics that as regards all matters pertaining to the con- 

 duct of mankind in social relations, as well as to the struc- 

 ture and proportions of the human body, uniform laws pre- 

 vail. Thus it is proved that in a given number of men of 

 the same race taken at random, a certain proportion will 

 be of the height of 5 feet 8 inches, which is the mean 

 height of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the proportion of men, 

 of all different heights above or below that standard re- 

 mains the same, and varies from the number of those of the 

 standard height by a law of mathematical relation. 



The same thing is observable with regard to girth of 

 waist and of other corporeal measurements. Stranger 

 still, it is found that the proportion of insane persons to 

 the entire community, though varying somewhat from 

 time to time, follows on the whole a mathematical relation ; 

 and the same is true of the proportion to each other and to 

 the number of the entire community of various kinds of 

 crimes committed. So, also, of the proportions of mar- 

 riages of persons of different ages, a mathematical uniform- 

 ity is found to hold good in the mass, notwithstanding all 

 the caprices of individuals. Thus it appears that in all the 



