Professor Sayce[126] says: “Identity or relationship of language can prove nothing more than social contact.... Language is an aid to the historian, not to the ethnologist.” But, as Professor Keane points out, there are many cases in which language infallibly proves the existence of ethnic elements which would otherwise have been unsuspected—as, for example, in the case of the Basques of Europe. “Language used with judgment is thus seen to be a great aid to the ethnologist in determining racial affinities, and in solving many anthropological difficulties” (1896, p. 205). Although Max Müller wrote nearly twenty years ago, “I believe the time will come when no anthropologist will venture to write on anything concerning the inner life of man without having himself acquired a knowledge of the language in which that inner life finds its truest expression,” we are obliged still to echo his lament: “How few of the books in which we trust with regard to the characteristics or peculiarities of savage races have been written by men ... who have learnt their languages until they could speak them as well as the natives themselves!”[127] Footnote 126: _Science of Language_, ii., p. 317. Footnote 127: _Rep. Brit. Assoc._ (Cardiff), 1891, p. 792. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII. CULTURAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT WE have seen that in its beginning the science of man was little more than a branch of zoology, and that his structural characters were the first to attract attention and to form the material of study; hence all the earlier classifications were based on physical features. Gallatin was one of the first to classify mankind rather by what they _do_ than by what they _are_. [Sidenote: =Gallatin.=] Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) was born at Geneva, emigrated to America before he was twenty, and rose rapidly to the position of one of the foremost of American statesmen, becoming United States Minister to France, and later to England. He noted the unsatisfactoriness of groupings by colour, stature, head-form, etc., in the case of the races of America, and made a preliminary classification of the native tribes on the basis of language. Major J. W. Powell (1834-1902) and Dr. Brinton (1837-1899) elaborated the linguistic classification of the American Indians. [Sidenote: =Wilhelm von Humboldt.=] Classification by language had already been utilised by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java, entitled _Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts_, which was published posthumously, 1836-40. The rise of the new science of philology gave a fresh impetus to this method of classification, which was adopted by F. Müller (1834-1898), and utilised recently by Deniker and various other writers.