THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO, 
1 77 
tonld exist. To view a fact as underserving of attention is to di¬ 
vorce it from its union with the living whole, and place it in a re¬ 
gion, unknown to being, where things may exist from and to them¬ 
selves. If we would seek to look upon truth face to face, we must 
cultivate a spirit of observation which no details can exhaust, and 
for which nothing is too minute so long as it may be the subject 
of discrimination. Devoid of this spirit, we shall every where 
stop short at half truths, satisfied that we have mastered the 
subject of our research. But this is an attitude which it is not 
given to man to assume in relation to any thing in which na¬ 
ture plays a part. He never has reached, and it is to be hoped ne¬ 
ver will reach, in any direction, that point at which the spirit of 
being says,—thitherto shalt thou come but no farther. Every 
man may advance as far as his own organization and the science 
of his day will carry him, and new and beautiful ideas are sure 
to reward his toil; but unless the pride of knowledge weds him 
to a delusion, he is never left to the cheerless reflection that he 
has reached the bounds of science. On the contrary, he feels that he 
stands on the brink of a measureless unknown, from the depths 
of which gleams of still grander truths flash through the inner 
darkness of his being, and connect him with the infinite. These are 
facts which it is well to bear in mind whatever subject we may 
seek to investigate, but it is particularly necessary to do so when en¬ 
gaged in ethnic enquiries, because there is a strong tendency in our 
habits, sympathies and antipathies to obscure our vision. 
All ethnography is in its nature more or less comparative. It is 
impossible to reconstruct the history of a race by limiting our view s 
to the race itself. To a certain extent we may grope our way hack 
to its normal condition, particularly through the medium of language, 
—and when our glottological discrimination becomes finer we may 
be able to do so in a strictly scientific manner,—but in races lop¬ 
pings do not long leave a scar or grafts retain their foreign aspect. 
The wound heals over. The graft, striking its fibres into the sys¬ 
tem and vivified by its life, loses much of its native colour and as¬ 
similates to that of the body of which it now forms a part. Eve¬ 
ry race is full at all times of the elements of change, and al¬ 
though at the epoch when we observe it, universal immobility may 
seem to have paralysed its vital expansiveness, we cannot be sure 
