44 THE ETIINOLOOT OF THK INDIAN ARCHIFEL.tOO* 



diversities in the physiological characters of race?. The ethnic 

 history of the world must present a succession of developments, 

 fixed forms of civilisation, and revolutions producing now deve- 

 lopments and destroying the predominance of the fixed forms. 

 All this reauires much time. Each successive development is of 

 extremely slow growth. When fixed, it necessarily endures long, 

 because, without the possession of great power, it could not have 



to be connected with a revolution of the kind indicated. It marks & 

 conscious or unconscious revolt, or an accidental deliverance, of the 

 mind from the shackles of habit and antiquity, the dawning and 

 prevalence of new ideas, and the formation of new phonetic and 

 ideologic habits. The main fask of the ethnologist is to dis- 

 criminate these developments, to ascertain the extent of their 

 influence an' 1 operation, and, if possible, to trace them to the 

 locality and the tribe, for we can never reach the family, in which 

 they originated. It would follow from what we have said on 

 ethnic geography, that at different times in the primordial era, 

 there may have been several developments and revolutions oc- 

 curring contemporaneously in districts secluded from each other. 

 But the majority of human races have a far greater tendency to 

 stagnate than to advance, and accidents and revolutions capabfe of 

 engendering new languages are rare and powerful in their operation. 

 When they happen they tend to transmit themselves far and wide, 

 though slowly, and to embrace numerous stagnant tribes in their 

 progress. 



A strong beam of li^ht is cant into this obscure era by the cer- 

 tainty that powerful civilisations arose at a very early period. The 

 Chinese civilisation, by protecting the language of the Hoang-ho, 

 has at once preserved a remnant of a very early language-, and a 

 record of its own extreme antiquity. The Egyptian civilisation 



certain intellectual level then prevailed over the world, and thai 

 the revolutions in which the Indo-European languages originated, 

 occurred subsequently to the beginning of the civilisations of 

 China and Egypt.* The prevalence of particular kinds of language 

 over considerable tracts becomes of great importance, if each 

 family of languages be thus the record of an ethnic revolution 

 and development, and its extent be a measure of the force and 

 predominance of the tribe in which it took place. 



Every great civilisation, intellectual or materia], tends to increase 

 population and to extend itself on all side* where physical 



• Strictly we can only conclude that In origin thfl Chairs* Ideology preceded 

 the Egyptian, and the Egyptian the African and other more advanced ideologic* 

 of the same harmoaic class. The organic change that produced the dfstinnw 



