Grimms, and Steinthals, and suggests that I do not know what has been said by such writers as Camper, Jacquart, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, Latham and Morton, not to mention the pernicious nonsense of Darwin, and the vagaries of Professor Huxley, I must be permitted to take exception. It is one thing to know what they have written, and quite another to accept their conclusions as absolute and final, considering how often we hear the most arrant nonsense solemnly propounded as the deductions of scientific investigation. It has been pointed out by a late minister of the Crown that “Newton’s projectile theory of Light” which had apparently been firmly established has given place to “the theory of undulation,” which, citing from the Virginian philosopher Dr. Smith, he says, “has now for fifty years reigned in its stead.” On this he grounds the suggestion that we should not “receive with impatience the assertion of contradictions.” On the subject of specialists we have the opinion of the same eminent individual, notable among the great intellects of the age, one who like Brougham, “has the languages of Greece and Rome strung like a bunch of keys at his girdle.” No less a personage in fact, than the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, with whom, while admiring the versatility of his genius, I differ politically, _toto cœlo_. To none of the sciences, rightly or wrongly so named, do his remarks more aptly apply than to the “Science of Language,” and its twin sister, “Ethnology.” “I have had the opportunity,” he says, “of perceiving how, among specialists as with other men, there may be fashions of the time and school, which Lord Bacon called idols of the market-place, and currents of prejudice below the surface, which may detract somewhat from the authority which each enquirer may justly claim in his own field, and from their title to impose their conclusions upon mankind.” In proof of the fluctuating and uncertain character of this so-called science Dr. Morton in regard to “certain points of primary importance found himself compelled to differ in opinion from the majority of scholars.” I believe with Bishop Percy, Dr. R. Angus Smith, and others, that the Celts and Teutons even remotely had not a common origin, but were _ab origine_ distinct races of mankind. As to _authority_ I hold that “no man is an authority for any statement which he cannot prove,” and although according to the critic of the _Literary World_, I deliver my opinions in a manner “more forcible than elegant”[5] my pretensions are exceedingly humble. “I venture to draw attention to the subject, in the hope that the matter may be taken up by some one with more time and better appliances at his disposal than I can command.” Without pretending to be “exhaustive or specially erudite” I have done the best I can to extinguish a national delusion, and I hope cannot finally, and altogether fail. If I be deficient in language, in whatever acceptation, I am in no worse