round the object he was in quest of without ever being able to attain it. Cluverius and his followers thus perceived that there was a certain affinity between the Celtic and Teutonic languages, but, in order to account for this affinity, had recourse to a gratuitous assumption on which they founded arguments that were necessarily erroneous and inconclusive. No one could have refuted these arguments with greater perspicuity and force of reasoning than Bishop Percy has done in the preceding admirable dissertation; but, while he completely demolishes the crude theory of Pelloutier, he falls himself into the error of denying that any, "even the most distant, resemblance" exists between the languages of the Celtic and Teutonic nations. Upon what grounds then," he adds, be retended that the ancient languages of Gaul and Germany flowed from one common source? or who will believe so improbable a fact?"+ 66 66 can it Now this fact, improbable as it appeared to Bishop Percy, has been admitted by the greatest philologists of the present age. No one certainly will any longer hesitate to regard the Celtic and Teutonic languages as forming two distinct linguistic families; but we think sufficient evidence has been adduced by those who have thoroughly investigated the subject, to warrant the conclusion that these families are remotely cognate, and, with six other linguistic families, do really * These writers could manage well enough to draw up a tolerable grammar from the remains of an ancient tongue, but they generally thrust the language thus reconstructed into a wrong place. This was the case with the Moso-Gothic. The reader will find, by referring to one of Bishop Percy's notes to chap. xi., that the fragments of a translation of the Gospels made by the Gothic Bishop Ulphilas in the fourth century, were discovered in the sixteenth century, in the library of a Westphalian convent. Now Hickes, Lye, and other celebrated English philologists of the last century, confounded this Gothic idiom with the Anglo-Saxon. The first part of Hickes's "Thesaurus," published in 1705, consists of an Anglo-Saxon and Moso-Gothic Grammar, 66 a work," as Rask observes, (see the Preface to his "AngloSaxon Grammar," Cop. 1830,) "far from faultless, as well by reason of the unfortunate idea of treating the two most dissimilar of the Teutonic tongues together, as in the execution of its respective parts." In 1772 Lye published his "Dictionarium Saxonico et Gothico-Latinum," in 2 vols. fol., in which we observe, to use Rask's words, "the same unfortunate blending of Anglo-Saxon and Meso-Gothic, languages which no more admit of being treated together than Hebrew and Arabic, or Greek and Latin." + See page 18. "flow from one common source." We shall not reproduce the arguments brought forward in support of this opinion, as we should be obliged to enter into a philological discussion, which for most of our readers would be totally devoid of interest; but as frequent mention will be made in this work of Scandinavians, Saxons, Goths, and other Teutonic nations, we shall attempt to point out, as briefly as possible, the precise relationship they stand in to each other, and conjointly, to other nations or races sprung from the same common source," referring the reader to the works of Rask, Schlegel, Grimm, Klaproth, Bopp, Arndt, and other eminent writers of the German school of philology, for more ample information on the subject, which he will find, on closer examination, to be well deserving of his attention. 66 Among the numerous sciences which the researches of the present age have given rise to, is one which, for want of a better name, has been called ethnology. This science falls into two branches-a physiological branch, which might appropriately be termed anthropology; and a philological branch, which forms the science of glossology. Anthropology shows the organic distinctions that constitute the varieties of the human species, inquires how these varieties have originated, whether they be reducible to one common type, or to several distinct types, strives to trace the affinities that connect them, and form a systematic classification of the various races that have hitherto appeared on the face of the globe. Glossology, on the other hand, investigates the construction and affinities of the various languages spoken by mankind, from the earliest that have left any vestiges of their existence down to those of the present day, assumes that a certain number may be regarded as primitive, from which all the others are derived, points out clearly this derivation, and then strives to connect the primitive languages themselves by tracing any philological affinities that may exist between them, with a view both of co-ordinating them into a systematic arrangement, and of ascertaining whether they have all sprung from a cornmon source-from a primordial tongue-or constitute a number of glottic groups totally unconnected. It will thus be seen, that although each of these sciences establishes a separate class of facts, they have essentially the same object in view, and may therefore be subordinated to a higher science, which by investigating and comparing the facts they respectively furnish, will ascertain how far physiological and philological affinities may be made to coincide-whether, for instance, several nations speaking cognate languages, but remotely connected with any other known tongue, are also distinguished by physiological traits sufficiently prominent to constitute a distinct race. A higher class of facts will thus be elicited, from which we may obtain by induction all the truths ethnological science can make us acquainted with. It is obvious, however, that this science cannot be cultivated with success until the subordinate sciences of anthropology and glossology have attained a certain degree of perfection. Anthropology, unfortunately, is still in its infancy. Man has certainly been made the object of a special study in every quarter of the globe, but it is only since a very recent period that this study has been conducted on scientific principles. The facts elicited are therefore not sufficiently numerous to form the groundwork of a well constructed system or warrant any general conclusion that might be drawn from them. We may, however, take for granted that man-the genus homohas only one species-which zoologists have been pleased to designate by the somewhat equivocal appellation of homo sapiens; or, in other words, that no specific difference exists among mankind. But this fact, even if it were established with a more rigorous certainty than it is at present, does not by any means solve the problem of the origin of the human race; for similar causes operating on two or more points of the globe, under similar circumstances, would necessarily produce similar results. Be this as it may, the varieties of the human species are endless, a circumstance which renders an accurate classification of them as difficult a task as a scientific arrangement of the animal kingdom itself. When zoologists fancied that the scale of being ascended in a straight line from the lowest radiary animals to man, classifications were comparatively easy, but when they at length discovered that instead of a chain it formed a most intricate network, in some places ravelled, in others rent, the task became much more difficult. They found that their classes and orders were connected by intermediate links, often too imperceptible to be seized, and that nature disregarded these artificial distinctions invented to assist the memory and enable our limited faculties to embrace the multifarious ramifications of organic life, diverging from a common trunk, and again uniting in the highest class of beings that has hitherto appeared on the face of the globe. They found, for instance, that the cyclostoma are a connecting link between fish and worms, that the cirrhopoda, or malentozoa, form a complete transition from molluscous to articulated animals, and that the animal and vegetable kingdoms themselves, which had been supposed so distinct, were intimately connected by the psychodiaria. Now, when we attempt to classify the varieties of the human species, we are placed in the same predicament as the zoologists. We might certainly, like the writers of a bygone age, leave the ark with Noah, and make Shem, Ham, and Japhet the progenitors of mankind †; but when we confine ourselves within the domain of science, we must necessarily proceed on principles more in accordance with physiological researches and historical facts; and then, whatever varieties may be taken as types for our classification, we find, when we * The lowest class of cartilaginous fish, comprising the lampril, the lamprey, &c. When we say of a bygone age, we fear that we must except some of our own writers who, somehow or other, generally manage to lag half a century behind their continental brethren; for we find in Jamieson's "Hermes Scythicus," a work of some pretension, published not in the seventeenth but in the nineteenth century, in the year of grace 1814, that the Thracians were the descendants of " Tiras, or rather Thiras, the son of Japhet." !! "And it seems beyond dispute," says this learned Scotch philologist with imperturbable gravity," that the Cimmerii were the posterity of Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, the Japetus of the Greeks, and that they were the first race that peopled Europe. The name is obviously retained by the descendants of the ancient Britons, who still denominate themselves Cumri."!!! This is much on a par with the raving of Dr. Parsons, who, in his "Remains of Japhet," published however in 1747, and consequently at a more pardonable epoch, maintains that the blood of Gomer still flows unsullied by any extraneous admixture in the veins of the Welsh and Irish, and that king George III. might claim descent from a long line of Scythian kings that can be traced up to Magog. In juxtaposition with the passage from Jamieson's work, published in 1814, we might place the following observations from Schlözer's " Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte," published in 1771. "The Gomerites and Magogites should no longer be suffered to disfigure our oldest northern history. Such names or such unlearned plictriplactri should be left to the English authors of the universal history, and to their German mechanical compilators." A passage which shows, more especially as Schlözer was by no means free from the erroneous ideas of the period, that the Germans are generally half a century in advance of us. group the other varieties around them, such a many odd fish like the cyclostoma in our way, that we soon become puzzled what to do with them. If a person saw before him a German, a Chinese, a Malay, an American Indian, and a Negro, he would not hesitate a moment to recognise five distinct varieties of the human species. But when these are taken for the types of a scientific classification, we are obliged to group the Jew with the German, the Finn with the Chinese, and the Caffre of the Cape with the Negro of Senegal. This, however, is the classification generally adopted, but it is so obviously defective that, in order to render it somewhat more in accordance with nature, we shall modify it as follows: VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 1. The WEST ASIATIC, or Caucasian Variety. Comprising the natives of India, Afghanistan, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Arabia, the Caucasus, Tartary, and Northern Africa, and, with the exception of those belonging to the Tshudic (Finnic) Race and a few Samojedes, all the Europeans and their descendants in America and the colonies. 2. The EAST ASIATIC, or Mongol Variety. The Mongols, Kalmucks, Manshus, Thibetans, Chinese, 3. The NORTH ASIATIC, or Arctic Variety. Most of the natives of the boreal regions of the globe. The Tshuds, (Finns, Lapps, Permians, &c.,) extending from the White Sea, along the Oural mountains, down to the Caspian. The Samojedes, Youkagirs, and various As the subject may be novel to many of our readers, we subjoin a definition of a type from Professor Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences." "Natural groups are best described, not by any definition which marks their boundaries, but by a type which marks their centre. The type of any natural group is an example which possesses, in a marked degree, all the leading characters of the class. "A natural group is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given in position, though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary without, but by a central point within; not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; by a type, not by a definition." -92nd and 93rd Aphorisms concerning Ideas. |