1893-94.] 'Dr; Mxmxo on Rise and Progress of Anthropology. 223 
speech to be in many instances merely a gloss over the more per- 
sistent racial characters of a former people. Coelum non animum 
mutant, qui trans mare currunt. It is indeed seldom that the most 
evanescent peculiarities of a people disappear altogether without 
leaving some traces behind them : even the fragments of a vanished 
language, when carefully looked for, will be found fossilised in the 
names of the outstanding features of the country — its mountains, 
valleys, rivers, lochs, forests, <fec. But it is the results obtained 
through recent methods of palseo-linguistic research that more 
especially interest us as anthropologists. These results may be 
better illustrated by a well-known example. A glance at the struc- 
tural elements of Italian, French, and Spanish is sufficient to show 
that these languages are direct descendants of Latin ; and had this 
language been absolutely lost, modern philologists could, to a large 
extent, have reconstructed it. By the application of their analytic 
methods to the inscribed materials dug out of the ruins of proto- 
historic monuments, philologists have been able to extend this field 
of research far back into prehistoric times. They have most con- 
clusively shown that the so-called Indo-European languages, com- 
prising Old Celtic, Latin, Greek, Gothic, Old Kussian, Old Persian, 
Sanskrit, &c., have descended from one common language. The 
existence of this language, however far back it may be removed 
from its varied offspring, necessarily implies a people who spoke it ; 
but who these primitive Aryans were, where they lived, and whence 
they came, are amongst the most controverted problems of the 
present day. Similarly, these linguistic archaeologists are now 
successfully pushing their investigations into the Accadian or pre- 
Semitic period, which underlies the civilisations of Assyria and 
Babylon. 
(3) Structure of Man. — The striking correspondence between the 
bodily structure of Man and that of some of the higher animals, 
such as the anthropoid apes, could hardly have escaped the atten- 
tion of reflective man in all ages ; and I have no doubt that long 
before Huxley published his work on Man^s Place in Nature, vague 
ideas of this kind had flitted across the brain of many a bygone 
philosopher. But all these premonitory glimmerings of the truth 
would be probably smothered, as it were in embryo, by the over- 
powering influence of prejudices founded on other issues. It is 
