REVIEW OF PHILOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL RESEARCHES. 5 13 
original languages, all of which, except that of the Ossetes, are 
destitute of any analogy to the Indo-European idioms. The 
Ossetes indeed speak a dialect resembling some of the lan¬ 
guages of that stock ; they are an inconsiderable tribe, who ap¬ 
pear to have found their way incidentally into the midst of races 
foreign to their lineage: and it would be absurd to regard them 
as the ancestral stock of so many great and anciently-civilized 
nations. 
“3. The Negroes of Africa and the woolly-haired natives of 
the Malayan mountains, and of New Guinea, and many islands 
in the Pacific at no great distance from New Holland, are re¬ 
ferred by M. Cuvier to his third race, which he supposes to 
have originated in Mount Atlas. The languages of these tribes 
are multifarious, and the migration of one part of them to the 
Eastern Ocean improbable and difficult to imagine. It is evi¬ 
dent that the attempt to identify the African Negroes with the 
Papuas of the Eastern Ocean rests on the physical peculiari¬ 
ties of these tribes, and that every other species of evidence is 
against it. But is it certain that no other principle can be found 
to account for the existence of nations resembling the Africans in 
New Guinea and the Eastern Islands ? Are not the torrid climes of 
these countries similar to that of Old Guinea? and do not all the 
other productions of nature likewise resemble those of Africa? 
It is not to be wondered at that the human species should assi¬ 
milate in these parallel latitudes and analogous situations. The 
black and woolly-haired variety of the human species is that 
which has ever thriven best in equatorial countries, and there 
is probably something in the nature of the torrid clime which 
favours its rise and propagation. If physical agencies pro¬ 
duced it once, similar agencies may have produced it wherever 
their influence has been exerted with a certain degree of inten¬ 
sity and under favourable circumstances.” 
The following are the general inferences which the author 
has deduced from the preceding statement. 
“It appears, on the whole, that the attempt to constitute par¬ 
ticular families of nations, or to divide the human species into 
several distinct races, upon the principle of a permanent and 
constant transmission of physical characters, is altogether im¬ 
practicable. In the first place, such divisions of races do not 
coincide with the divisions of languages. We shall find one 
class of men as distinguished by physical character, including 
several races entirely distinct from each other, when reference 
is made to their languages. Thus the Turkish or Tartar race 
are separated by their language from the Indo-European na¬ 
tions, and the distinction is not less when we go back to the 
earliest ages. How distant indeed must have been (he period 
