[351] “I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this philological barbarism is permitted me) do not resemble one another _because_ they come from the same parent, but because they have been brought up together; Africa especially seems to me to furnish a proof of it, for we must study the history of families of languages, especially in the place where they began to be formed, and I believe that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is not applicable to all cases, but to several; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish, etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death; but many other languages appear to me to take their features one from the other by simple frequentation, by the natives being often in company together, and, as time goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages, like the branches of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not exist.”--_Correspondence_, 1857. [352] See above, p. 78. [353] [Pali, the ordinary language of daily life in Hindoostan at the time when Sanscrit was used in elevated literature alone.--EDITOR.] [354] _Des Colorations de l’épiderme_, 4to, Paris, 1864. [355] See _The Natural History of Man_, 1844. [356] See _Ethnographic Tableau_ (_Indigenous Races of the Earth_, London, 1857). [357] We may quote, as types of genus, two paintings, incomparable in an anthropological point of view, _Portrait d’un Nègre_; _Portrait d’un Oriental_, by Herschop (Berlin Museum, Nos. 825 and 827). [358] M. Flourens, in saying that Buffon collected the accounts of different travellers in order to write his _Histoire des Races_, adds, “Whatever they have only seen with the eyes of their body, he sees with the eyes of his mind, and by that means alone he sees better than they can; each of them has seen merely some scattered characteristics,--Buffon sees everything; he links together whatever they may have separated, and separates whatever they have confounded.”--_Histoire des Idées de Buffon_, p. 167. [359] “Boni viri nullam oportet esse causam præter veritatem.” [360] [Yes, but the difficulty is to determine if it _is_ true. We cannot receive _anything_ as true merely because a _savant_ says it is so. We must go on enquiring in a proper spirit; but we must not put inquiry after truth in the same category with scepticism,--“that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty respecting anything and everything here on earth seems unattainable.” This is the age for seeking after truth; but in how many different ways do men endeavour to attain to it! We must search the past carefully in all its scientific and natural facts, and as Longfellow beautifully says,-- “Nor deem the irrevocable past, As wholly wasted, wholly vain, If, rising on its wrecks, at last To something nobler we attain.” This is the true aim of all inquiry.--EDITOR.] Transcriber’s Notes