Perhaps there could not be found four great thinkers more different in their tendencies of thought and range of study than Goethe, Spurzheim, Dr. Prichard, and Max Müller; yet these four, each by his own method of observation, have shown with conclusive force the law of variety and of permanence in organization. Goethe asserts that every individual man carries from his birth to his grave an unalterable speciality of being,--that he is, down to the smallest fibre of his character, one and the same man; and that the whole mighty power of circumstance, modifying everything, cannot abolish anything,--that organization and circumstance hold on together with an equally permanent influence in every human life. Gall and Spurzheim teach that every fibre of the brain has its original quality and force, and that such qualities and forces are transmitted by obscure but certain laws of descent. Prichard, with immense learning, describes race after race, giving the types of each human family in its physiology. And, finally, the great science of comparative philology, worked out by such thinkers and students as Bopp, Latham, Humboldt, Bunsen, Max Müller, and a host of others, has proved the permanence of human varieties by ample glossological evidence. Thus the modern science of ethnology has arisen, on the basis of physiology, philology, and ethology, and is perhaps the chief discovery of the age. Yet Mr. Buckle quietly ignores the whole of it, and continues, with Locke, to regard every human mind as a piece of white paper, to be written on by external events,--a piece of soft putty, to be moulded by circumstances. The facts on which the science of ethnology rests are so numerous and so striking, that the only difficulty in selecting an illustration is from the quantity and richness of material. But we may take two instances,--that of the Teutons and Kelts, to show the permanence of differences under the same circumstances, and that of the Jews, the Arabs, and the Gypsies, to show the continuity of identity under different circumstances. For if it can be made evident that different races of men preserve different characters, though living for long periods under similar circumstances, and that the same race preserves the same character, though living for long periods under different circumstances, the proof is conclusive that character is _not_ derived from circumstances only. We shall not indeed go to the extreme of such ethnologists as Knox, Nott, or Gliddon, and say that "Race is everything, and circumstances nothing," but we shall see that Mr. Buckle is mistaken in saying that "Circumstances are everything, and race nothing."