Such are the criticisms which may be urged against the historical methods now in vogue. What, you will ask, is offered in their stead? That which I offer is the view of the ethnologist. It is not so ambitious as some I have named. It does not deal in eternal laws, nor divine the distant future. The ethnologist does not profess to have been admitted into the counsels of the Almighty, nor to have caught in his grasp the secret purposes of the Universe. He seeks the sufficient reason for known facts, and is content with applying the knowledge he gains to present action. Before stating the view of the ethnologist, I must briefly describe what the science of Ethnology is. You will see at once how closely it is allied to history, and that the explanation of the one almost carries with it the prescription for the other. It begins with the acknowledged maxim that man is by nature a gregarious animal, a _zoon politikon_, as Aristotle called him, living in society, and owing to society all those traits which it is the business of history, as distinguished from biology, to study. From this standpoint, all that the man is he owes to others; and what the others are, they owe, in part, to him. Together, they make up the social unit, at first the family or clan, itself becoming part of a larger unit, a tribe, nation or people. The typical folk, or _ethnos_, is a social unit, the members of which are bound together by certain traits common to all or most, which impart to them a prevailing character, an organic unity, specific peculiarities and general tendencies. You may inquire what these traits are to which I refer as making up ethnic character. The answer cannot be so precise as you would like. We are dealing with a natural phenomenon, and Nature, as Goethe once remarked, never makes groups, but only individuals. The group is a subjective category of our own minds. It is, nevertheless, psychologically real, and capable of definition. The _Ethnos_ must be defined, like a species of natural history, by a rehearsal of a series of its characteristics, not by one alone. The members of this series are numerous, and by no means of equal importance; I shall mention the most prominent of them, and in the order in which I believe they should be ranked for influence on national character. First, I should rank Language. Not only is it the medium of intelligible intercourse, of thought-tranference,[TN-3] but thought itself is powerfully aided or impeded by the modes of its expression in sound. As "spoken language," in poetry and oratory, its might is recognized on all hands; while in "written language," as literature, it works silently but with incalculable effect on the character of a people.[10-1]