Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
the alleged popular confusion came, it certainly did not come from any
teaching of scientific philologers.
The truth of all this cannot be called in question. We have too many
instances in recorded history of nations laying aside the use of one
language and taking to the use of another, for anyone who cares for
accuracy to set down language as any sure test of race. In fact, the
studies of the philologer and those of the ethnologer strictly so
called are quite distinct, and they deal with two wholly different sets
of phenomena. The science of the ethnologer is strictly a physical
science. He has to deal with purely physical phenomena; his business
lies with the different varieties of the human body, and specially, to
take that branch of his inquiries which most impresses the unlearned,
with the various conformations of the human skull. His researches
differ in nothing from those of the zooelogist or the paleontologist,
except that he has to deal with the physical phenomena of man, while
they deal with the physical phenomena of other animals. He groups the
different races of men, exactly as the others group the genera and
species of living or extinct mammals or reptiles. The student of
ethnology as a physical science may indeed strengthen his conclusions
by evidence of other kinds, evidence from arms, ornaments, pottery,
modes of burial. But all these are secondary; the primary ground of
classification is the physical conformation of man himself. As to
language, the ethnological method, left to itself, can find out nothing
whatever. The science of the ethnologer then is primarily physical; it
is historical only in that secondary sense in which paleontology, and
geology itself, may fairly be called historical. It arranges the
varieties of mankind according to a strictly physical classification;
what the language of each variety may have been, it leaves to the
professors of another branch of study to find out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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