hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of embryos, may, by this process of partly active and partly passive migration, cover an immense surface with its offspring. The masses of coral which may be formed by the assemblages of polypes which spring by budding, or by dividing, from a single polype, occasionally attain very considerable dimensions. Such skeletons are sometimes great plates, many feet long and several feet in thickness; or they may form huge half globes, like the brainstone corals, or may reach the magnitude of stout shrubs, or even small trees. There is reason to believe that such masses as these take a long time to form, and hence that the age a polype tree, or polype turf, may attain, may be considerable. But, sooner or later, the coral polypes, like all other things, die; the soft flesh decays, while the skeleton is left as a stony mass at the bottom of the sea, where it retains its integrity for a longer or a shorter time, according as its position affords it more or less protection from the wear and tear of the waves.
The polypes which give rise to the white coral are found, as has been said, in the seas of all parts of the world; but in the temperate and cold oceans they are scattered and comparatively small in size, so that the skeletons of those which die do not accumulate in any considerable quantity. But it is otherwise in the greater part of the ocean which lies in the warmer parts of the world, comprised within a distance of about 1,800 miles on each side of the equator. Within the zone thus bounded, by far the greater part of the ocean is inhabited by coral polypes, which not only form very strong and large skeletons, but associate together into great masses, like the thickets and the meadow turf, or, better still, the accumulations of peat, to which plants give rise on the dry land. These masses of stony matter, heaped up beneath the waters of the ocean, become as dangerous to mariners as so much ordinary rock, and to these, as to common rock ridges, the seaman gives the name of “reefs.”
Such coral reefs cover many thousand square miles in the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans. There is one reef, or rather great series of reefs, called the Barrier Reef, which stretches, almost continuously, for more than 1,100 miles off the east coast of Australia. Multitudes of the island in the Pacific are either reefs themselves, or are surrounded by reefs. The Red Sea is in many parts almost a maze of such reefs; and they abound no less in the West Indies, along the coast of Florida, and even as far north as the Bahama Islands. But it is a very remarkable circumstance that, within the area of what we may call the “coral zone,” there are no coral reefs upon the west coast of America, nor upon the west coast of Africa; and it is a general fact that the reefs are interrupted, or absent, opposite the mouths of great rivers. The causes of this apparent caprice in the distribution of coral reefs are not far to seek. The polypes which fabricate them require for their vigorous growth a temperature which must not fall below 68 degrees Fahrenheit all the year round, and this temperature is only to be found within the distance on each side of the equator which has been mentioned, or thereabouts. But even within the coral zone this degree of warmth is not everywhere to be had. On the west coast of America, and on the corresponding coast of Africa, currents of cold water from the icy regions which surround the South Pole set northward, and it appears to be due to their cooling influence that the sea in these regions is free from the reef builders. Again, the coral polypes cannot live in water which is rendered brackish by floods from the land, or which is perturbed by mud from the same source, and hence it is that they cease to exist opposite the mouths of rivers, which damage them in both these ways.
Such is the general distribution of the reef-building corals, but there are some very interesting and singular circumstances to be observed in the conformation of the reefs, when we consider them individually. The reefs, in fact, are of three different kinds; some of them stretch out from the shore, almost like a prolongation of the beach, covered only by shallow water, and in the case of an island, surrounding it like a fringe of no considerable breadth. These are termed “fringing reefs.” Others are separated by a channel which may attain a width of many miles, and a depth of twenty or thirty fathoms or more, from the nearest land; and when this land is an island, the reef surrounds it like a low wall, and the sea between the reef and the land is, as it were, a moat inside this wall. Such reefs as these are called “encircling” when they surround an island; and “barrier” reefs, when they stretch parallel with the coast of a continent. In both these cases there is ordinary dry land inside the reef, and separated from it only by a narrower or a wider, a shallower or a deeper, space of sea, which is called a “lagoon,” or “inner passage.” But there is a third kind of reef, of very common occurrence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which goes by the name of an “Atoll.” This is, to all intents and purposes, an encircling reef, without anything to encircle; or, in other words, without an island in the middle of its lagoon. The atoll has exactly the appearance of a vast, irregularly oval, or circular, breakwater, enclosing smooth water in its midst. The depth of the water in the lagoon rarely exceeds twenty or thirty fathoms, but, outside the reef, it deepens with great rapidity to 200 or 300 fathoms. The depth immediately outside the barrier, or encircling, reefs, may also be very considerable; but, at the outer edge of a fringing reef, it does not amount usually to more than twenty or twenty-five fathoms; in other words, from 120 to 150 feet.
Thus, if the water of the ocean could be suddenly drained away, we should see the atolls rising from the sea-bed like vast truncated cones, and resembling so many volcanic craters, except that their sides would be steeper than those of an ordinary volcano. In the case of the encircling reefs, the cone, with the enclosed island, would look like Vesuvius with Monte Nuovo within the old crater of Somma; while, finally, the island with a fringing reef would have the appearance of an ordinary hill, or mountain, girded by a vast parapet, within which would lie a shallow moat. And the dry bed of the Pacific might afford grounds for an inhabitant of the moon to speculate upon the extraordinary subterranean activity to which these vast and numerous “craters” bore witness!
When the structure of a fringing reef is investigated, the bottom of the lagoon is found to be covered with fine whitish mud, which results from the breaking up of the dead corals. Upon this muddy floor there lie, here and there, growing corals, or occasionally great blocks of dead coral, which have been torn by storms from the outer edge of the reef, and washed into the lagoon. Shell-fish and worms of various kinds abound; and fish, some of which prey upon the coral, sport in the deeper pools. But the corals which are to be seen growing in the shallow waters of the lagoon are of a different kind from those which abound on the outer edge of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in calm weather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vegetable organism, which contains a great deal of lime–the so-called _Nullipora_. Beyond this, in the part of the edge of the reef which is always covered by the breaking waves, the living, true, reef–polypes make their appearance; and, in different forms, coat the steep seaward face of the reef to a depth of 100 or even 150 feet. Beyond this depth the sounding-lead rests, not upon the wall-like face of the reef, but on the ordinary shelving sea-bottom. And the distance to which a fringing reef extends from the land corresponds with that at which the sea has a depth of twenty or five-and-twenty fathoms.
If, as we have supposed, the sea could be suddenly withdrawn from around an island provided with a fringing reef, such as the Mauritius, the reef would present the aspect of a terrace, its seaward face, 100 feet or more high, blooming with the animal flowers of the coral, while its surface would be hollowed out into a shallow and irregular moat-like excavation.
The coral mud, which occupies the bottom of the lagoon, and with which all the interstices of the coral skeletons which accumulate to form the reef are filled up, does not proceed from the washing action of the waves alone; innumerable fishes, and other creatures which prey upon the coral, add a very important contribution of finely-triturated calcareous matter; and the corals and mud becoming incorporated together, gradually harden and give rise to a sort of limestone rock, which may vary a good deal in texture. Sometimes it remains friable and chalky, but, more often, the infiltration of water, charged with carbonic acid, dissolves some of the calcareous matter, and deposits it elsewhere in the interstices of the nascent rock, thus glueing and cementing the particles together into a hard mass; or it may even dissolve the carbonate of lime more extensively, and re-deposit it in a crystalline form. On the beach of the lagoon, where the coral sand is washed into layers by the action of the waves, its grains become thus fused together into strata of a limestone, so hard that they ring when struck with a hammer, and inclined at a gentle angle, corresponding with that of the surface of the beach. The hard parts of the many animals which live upon the reef become imbedded in this coral limestone, so that a block may be full of shells of bivalves and univalves, or of sea-urchins; and even sometimes encloses the eggs of turtles in a state of petrifaction. The active and vigorous growth of the reef goes on only at the seaward margins, where the polypes are exposed to the wash of the surf, and are thereby provided with an abundant supply of air and of food. The interior portion of the reef may be regarded as almost wholly an accumulation of dead skeletons. Where a river comes down from the land there is a break in the reef, for the reasons which have been already mentioned.
The origin and mode of formation of a fringing reef, such as that just described, are plain enough. The embryos of the coral polypes have fixed themselves upon the submerged shore of the island, as far out as they could live, namely, to a depth of twenty or twenty-five fathoms. One generation has succeeded another, building itself up upon the dead skeletons of its predecessor. The mass has been consolidated by the infiltration of coral mud, and hardened by partial solution and redeposition, until a great rampart of coral rock 100 or 150 feet high on its seaward face has been formed all round the island, with only such gaps as result from the outflow of rivers, in the place of sally-ports.
The structure of the rocky accumulation in the encircling reefs and in the atolls is essentially the same as in the fringing reef. But, in addition to the differences of depth inside and out, they present some other peculiarities. These reefs, and especially the atolls, are usually interrupted at one part of their circumference, and this part is always situated on the leeward side of the reef, or that which is the more sheltered side. Now, as all these reefs are situated within the region in which the trade-winds prevail, it follows that, on the north side of the equator, where the trade-wind is a north-easterly wind, the opening of the reef is on the south-west side: while in the southern hemisphere, where the trade-winds blow from the south-east, the opening lies to the north-west. The curious practical result follows from this structure, that the lagoons of these reefs really form admirable harbours, if a ship can only get inside them. But the main difference between the encircling reefs and the atolls, on the one hand, and the fringing reefs on the other, lies in the fact of the much greater depth of water on the seaward faces of the former. As a consequence of this fact, the whole of this face is not, as it is in the case of the fringing reef, covered with living coral polypes. For, as we have seen, these polypes cannot live at a greater depth than about twenty-five fathoms; and actual observation has shown that while, down to this depth, the sounding-lead will bring up branches of live coral from the outer wall of such a reef, at a greater depth it fetches to the surface nothing but dead coral and coral sand. We must, therefore, picture to ourselves an atoll, or an encircling reef, as fringed for 100 feet, or more, from its summit, with coral polypes busily engaged in fabricating coral; while, below this comparatively narrow belt, its surface is a bare and smooth expanse of coral sand, supported upon and within a core of coral limestone. Thus, if the bed of the Pacific were suddenly laid bare, as was just now supposed, the appearance of the reef-mountains would be exactly the reverse of that presented by many high mountains on land. For these are white with snow at the top, while their bases are clothed with an abundant and gaudily-coloured vegetation. But the coral cones would look grey and barren below, while their summits would be gay with a richly-coloured parterre of flower-like coral polypes.
The practical difficulties of sounding upon, and of bringing up portions of, the seaward face of an atoll or of an encircling reef, are so great, in consequence of the constant and dangerous swell which sets towards it, that no exact information concerning the depth to which the reefs are composed of coral has yet been obtained. There is no reason to doubt, however, that the reef-cone has the same structure from its summit to its base, and that its sea-wall is throughout mainly composed of dead coral.
And now arises a serious difficulty. If the coral polypes cannot live at a greater depth than 100 or 150 feet, how can they have built up the base of the reef-cone, which may be 2,000 feet, or more, below the surface of the sea?
In order to get over this objection, it was at one time supposed that the reef-building polypes had settled upon the summits of a chain of submarine mountains. But what is there in physical geography to justify the assumption of the existence of a chain of mountains stretching for 1,000 miles or more, and so nearly of the same height, that none should rise above the level of the sea, nor fall 150 feet below that level?
How again, on this hypothesis, are atolls to be accounted for, unless, as some have done, we take refuge in the wild supposition that every atoll corresponds with the crater of a submarine volcano? And what explanation does it afford of the fact that, in some parts of the ocean, only atolls and encircling reefs occur, while others present none but fringing reefs?
These and other puzzling facts remained insoluble until the publication, in the year 1840, of Mr. Darwin’s famous work on coral reefs; in which a key was given to all the difficult problems connected with the subject, and every difficulty was shown to be capable of solution by deductive reasoning from a happy combination of certain well-established geological and biological truths. Mr. Darwin, in fact, showed, that so long as the level of the sea remains unaltered in any area in which coral reefs are being formed, or if the level of the sea relatively to that of the land is falling, the only reefs which can be formed are fringing reefs. While if, on the contrary, the level of the sea is rising relatively to that of the land, at a rate not faster than that at which the upward growth of the coral can keep pace with it, the reef will gradually pass from the condition of a fringing, into that of an encircling or barrier reef. And, finally, that if the relative level of the sea rise so much that the encircled land is completely submerged, the reef must necessarily pass into the condition of an atoll.
For, suppose the relative level of the sea to remain stationary, after a fringing reef has reached that distance from the land at which the depth of water amounts to 150 feet. Then the reef cannot extend seaward by the migration of coral germs, because these coral germs would find the bottom of the sea to be too deep for them to live in. And the only manner in which the reef could extend outwards, would be by the gradual accumulation, at the foot of its seaward face, of a talus of coral fragments torn off by the violence of the waves, which talus might, in course of time, become high enough to bring its upper surface within the limits of coral growth, and in that manner provide a sort of factitious sea-bottom upon which the coral embryos might perch. If, on the other hand, the level of the sea were slowly and gradually lowered, it is clear that the parts of its bottom originally beyond the limit of coral growth, would gradually be brought within the required distance of the surface, and thus the reef might be indefinitely extended. But this process would give rise neither to an encircling reef nor to an atoll, but to a broad belt of upheaved coral rock, increasing the dimensions of the dry land, and continuous seawards with the fresh fringing reef.
Suppose, however, that the sea-level rose instead of falling, at the same slow and gradual rate at which we know it to be rising in some parts of the world–not more, in fact, than a few inches, or, at most, a foot or two, in a hundred years. Then, while the reef would be unable to extend itself seaward, the sea-bottom outside it being gradually more and more removed from the depth at which the life of the coral polypes is possible, it would be able to grow upwards as fast as the sea rose. But the growth would take place almost exclusively around the circumference of the reef, this being the only region in which the coral polypes would find the conditions favourable for their existence. The bottom of the lagoon would be raised, in the main, only by the coral _debris_ and coral mud, formed in the manner already described; consequently, the margins of the reef would rise faster than the bottom, or, in other words, the lagoon would constantly become deeper. And, at the same time, it would gradually increase in breadth; as the rising sea, covering more and more of the land, would occupy a wider space between the edge of the reef and what remained of the land. Thus the rising sea would eventually convert a large island with a fringing reef, into a small island surrounded by an encircling reef. And it will be obvious that when the rising of the sea has gone so far as completely to cover the highest points of the island, the reef will have passed into the condition of an atoll.
But how is it possible that the relative level of the land and sea should be altered to this extent? Clearly, only in one of two ways: either the sea must have risen over those areas which are now covered by atolls and encircling reefs; or, the land upon which the sea rests must have been depressed to a corresponding extent.
If the sea has risen, its rise must have taken place over the whole world simultaneously, and it must have risen to the same height over all parts of the coral zone. Grounds have been shown for the belief that the general level of the sea may have been different at different times; it has been suggested, for example, that the accumulation of ice about the poles during one of the cold periods of the earth’s history, necessarily implies a diminution in the volume of the sea proportioned to the amount of its water thus permanently locked up in the Arctic and Antarctic ice-cellars; while, in the warm periods, the greater or less disappearance of the polar ice-cap implies a corresponding addition of water to the ocean. And no doubt this reasoning must be admitted to be sound in principle; though it is very hard to say what practical effect the additions and subtractions thus made have had on the level of the ocean; inasmuch as such additions and subtractions might be either intensified or nullified, by contemporaneous changes in the level of the land. And no one has yet shown that any such great melting of polar ice, and consequent raising of the level of the water of the ocean, has taken place since the existing atolls began to be formed.
In the absence of any evidence that the sea has ever risen to the extent required to give rise to the encircling reefs and the atolls, Mr. Darwin adopted the opposite hypothesis, viz. that the land has undergone extensive and slow depression in those localities in which these structures exist.
It seems, at first, a startling paradox, to suppose that the land is less fixed than the sea; but that such is the case is the uniform testimony of geology. Beds of sandstone or limestone, thousands of feet thick, and all full of marine remains, occur in various parts of the earth’s surface, and prove, beyond a doubt, that when these beds were formed, that portion of the sea-bottom which they then occupied underwent a slow and gradual depression to a distance which cannot have been less than the thickness of those beds, and may have been very much greater. In supposing, therefore, that the great areas of the Pacific and of the Indian Ocean, over which atolls and encircling reefs are found scattered, have undergone a depression of some hundreds, or, it may be, thousands of feet, Mr. Darwin made a supposition which had nothing forced or improbable, but was entirely in accordance with what we know to have taken place over similarly extensive areas, in other periods of the world’s history. But Mr. Darwin subjected his hypothesis to an ingenious indirect test. If his view be correct, it is clear that neither atolls, nor encircling reefs, should be found in those portions of the ocean in which we have reason to believe, on independent grounds, that the sea-bottom has long been either stationary, or slowly rising. Now it is known that, as a general rule, the level of the land is either stationary, or is undergoing a slow upheaval, in the neighbourhood of active volcanoes; and, therefore, neither atolls nor encircling reefs ought to be found in regions in which volcanoes are numerous and active. And this turns out to be the case. Appended to Mr. Darwin’s great work on coral reefs, there is a map on which atolls and encircling reefs are indicated by one colour, fringing reefs by another, and active volcanoes by a third. And it is at once obvious that the lines of active volcanoes lie around the margins of the areas occupied by the atolls and the encircling reefs. It is exactly as if the upheaving volcanic agencies had lifted up the edges of these great areas, while their centres had undergone a corresponding depression. An atoll area may, in short, be pictured as a kind of basin, the margins of which have been pushed up by the subterranean forces, to which the craters of the volcanoes have, at intervals, given vent.
Thus we must imagine the area of the Pacific now covered by the Polynesian Archipelago, as having been, at some former time, occupied by large islands, or, may be, by a great continent, with the ordinarily diversified surface of plain, and hill, and mountain chain. The shores of this great land were doubtless fringed by coral reefs; and, as it slowly underwent depression, the hilly regions, converted into islands, became, at first, surrounded by fringing reefs, and then, as depression went on, these became converted into encircling reefs, and these, finally, into atolls, until a maze of reefs and coral-girdled islets took the place of the original land masses.
Thus the atolls and the encircling reefs furnish us with clear, though indirect, evidence of changes in the physical geography of large parts of the earth’s surface; and even, as my lamented friend, the late Professor Jukes, has suggested, give us indications of the manner in which some of the most puzzling facts connected with the distribution of animals have been brought about. For example, Australia and New Guinea are separated by Torres Straits, a broad belt of sea 100 or 120 miles wide. Nevertheless, there is in many respects a curious resemblance between the land animals which inhabit New Guinea and the land animals which inhabit Australia. But, at the same time, the marine shell-fish which are found in the shallow waters of the shores of New Guinea, are quite different from those which are met with upon the coasts of Australia. Now, the eastern end of Torres Straits is full of atolls, which, in fact, form the northern termination of the Great Barrier Reef which skirts the eastern coast of Australia. It follows, therefore, that the eastern end of Torres Straits is an area of depression, and it is very possible, and on many grounds highly probable, that, in former times, Australia and New Guinea were directly connected together, and that Torres Straits did not exist. If this were the case, the existence of cassowaries and of marsupial quadrupeds, both in New Guinea and in Australia, becomes intelligible; while the difference between the littoral molluscs of the north and the south shores of Torres Straits is readily explained by the great probability that, when the depression in question took place, and what was, at first, an arm of the sea became converted into a strait separating Australia from New Guinea, the northern shore of this new sea became tenanted with marine animals from the north, while the southern shore was peopled by immigrants from the already existing marine Australian fauna.
Inasmuch as the growth of the reef depends upon that of successive generations of coral polypes, and as each generation takes a certain time to grow to its full size, and can only separate its calcareous skeleton from the water in which it lives at a certain rate, it is clear that the reefs are records not only of changes in physical geography, but of the lapse of time. It is by no means easy, however, to estimate the exact value of reef-chronology, and the attempts which have been made to determine the rate at which a reef grows vertically, have yielded anything but precise results. A cautious writer, Mr. Dana, whose extensive study of corals and coral reefs makes him an eminently competent judge, states his conclusion in the following terms:–
“The rate of growth of the common branching madrepore is not over one and a half inches a year. As the branches are open, this would not be equivalent to more than half an inch in height of solid coral for the whole surface covered by the madrepore; and, as they are also porous, to not over three-eighths of an inch of solid limestone. But a coral plantation has large bare patches without corals, and the coral sands are widely distributed by currents, part of them to depths over one hundred feet where there are no living corals; not more than one-sixth of the surface of a reef region is, in fact, covered with growing species. This reduces the three-eighths to _one-sixteenth_. Shells and other organic relics may contribute one-fourth as much as corals. At the outside, the average upward increase of the whole reef-ground per year would not exceed _one-eighth_ of an inch.
“Now some reefs are at least two thousand feet thick, which at one-eighth of an inch a year, corresponds to one hundred and ninety-two thousand years.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Dana, “Manual of Geology,” p. 591.]
Halve, or quarter, this estimate if you will, in order to be certain of erring upon the right side, and still there remains a prodigious period during which the ancestors of the existing coral polypes have been undisturbedly at work; and during which, therefore, the climatal conditions over the coral area must have been much what they are now.
And all this lapse of time has occurred within the most recent period of the history of the earth. The remains of reefs formed by coral polypes of different kinds from those which exist now, enter largely into the composition of the limestones of the Jurassic period; and still more widely different coral polypes have contributed their quota to the vast thickness of the carboniferous and Devonian strata. Then as regards the latter group of rocks in America, the high authority already quoted tells us:–
“The Upper Helderberg period is eminently the coral reef period of the palaeozoic ages. Many of the rocks abound in coral, and are as truly coral reefs as the modern reefs of the Pacific. The corals are sometimes standing on the rocks in the position they had when growing: others are lying in fragments, as they were broken and heaped by the waves; and others were reduced to a compact limestone by the finer trituration before consolidation into rock. This compact variety is the most common kind among the coral reef rocks of the present seas; and it often contains but few distinct fossils, although formed in water that abounded in life. At the fall of the Ohio, near Louisville, there is a magnificent display of the old reef. Hemispherical _Favosites_, five or six feet in diameter, lie there nearly as perfect as when they were covered by their flower-like polypes; and besides these, there are various branching corals, and a profusion of _Cyathophiyllia_, or cup-corals.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Dana, “Manual of Geology,” p. 272.]
Thus, in all the great periods of the earth’s history of which we know anything, a part of the then living matter has had the form of polypes, competent to separate from the water of the sea the carbonate of lime necessary for their own skeletons. Grain by grain, and particle by particle, they have built up vast masses of rock, the thickness of which is measured by hundreds of feet, and their area by thousands of square miles. The slow oscillations of the crust of the earth, producing great changes in the distribution of land and water, have often obliged the living matter of the coral-builders to shift the locality of its operations; and, by variation and adaptation to these modifications of condition, its forms have as often changed. The work it has done in the past is, for the most part, swept away, but fragments remain; and, if there were no other evidence, suffice to prove the general constancy of the operations of Nature in this world, through periods of almost inconceivable duration.
VII.
ON THE METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY.
Ethonology is the science which determines the distinctive characters of the persistent modifications of mankind; which ascertains the distribution of those modifications in present and past times, and seeks to discover the causes, or conditions of existence, both of the modifications and of their distribution. I say “persistent” modifications, because, unless incidentally, ethnology has nothing to do with chance and transitory peculiarities of human structure. And I speak of “persistent modifications” or “stocks” rather than of “varieties,” or “races,” or “species,” because each of these last well-known terms implies, on the part of its employer, a preconceived opinion touching one of those problems, the solution of which is the ultimate object of the science; and in regard to which, therefore, ethnologists are especially bound to keep their minds open and their judgments freely balanced.
Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of anthropology, the great science which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out the relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially human in the mode in which man’s complex functions are performed; and searches after the conditions which have determined his presence in the world. And anthropology is a section of zoology, which again is the animal half of biology–the science of life and living things.
Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objects of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to reach his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view of the pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,–“persistent modifications” of man’s almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity–language; and assuming that what is true of speech is true of the speaker–a hypothesis as questionable in science as it is in ordinary life–he may apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a searching analysis of their words and grammatical forms.
Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the practical life of men; and relying upon the inherent conservatism and small inventiveness of untutored mankind, he may hope to discover in manners and customs, or in weapons, dwellings, and other handiwork, a clue to the origin of the resemblances and differences of nations. Or, he may resort to that kind of evidence which is yielded by history proper, and consists of the beliefs of men concerning past events, embodied in traditional, or in written, testimony. Or, when that thread breaks, archaeology, which is the interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man’s works, belonging to the epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may still guide him. And, when even the dim light of archaeology fades, there yet remains paleontology, which, in these latter years, has brought to daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was not our world, who have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of tradition.
Along each, or all, of these paths the ethnologist may press towards his goal; but they are not equally straight, or sure, or easy to tread. The way of palaeontology has but just been laid open to us. Archaeological and historical investigations are of great value for all those peoples whose ancient state has differed widely from their present condition, and who have the good or evil fortune to possess a history. But on taking a broad survey of the world, it is astonishing how few nations present either condition. Respecting five-sixths of the persistent modifications of mankind, history and archaeology are absolutely silent. For half the rest, they might as well be silent for anything that is to be made of their testimony. And, finally, when the question arises as to what was the condition of mankind more than a paltry two or three thousand years ago, history and archaeology are, for the most part, mere dumb dogs. What light does either of these branches of knowledge throw on the past of the man of the New World, if we except the Central Americans and the Peruvians; on that of the Africans, save those of the valley of the Nile and a fringe of the Mediterranean; on that of all the Polynesian, Australian, and central Asiatic peoples, the former of whom probably, and the last certainly, were, at the dawn of history, substantially what they are now? While thankfully accepting what history has to give him, therefore, the ethnologist must not look for too much from her.
Is more to be expected from inquiries into the customs and handicrafts of men? It is to be feared not. In reasoning from identity of custom to identity of stock the difficulty always obtrudes itself, that the minds of men being everywhere similar, differing in quality and quantity but not in kind of faculty, like circumstances must tend to produce like contrivances; at any rate, so long as the need to be met and conquered is of a very simple kind. That two nations use calabashes or shells for drinking-vessels, or that they employ spears, or clubs, or swords and axes of stone and metal as weapons and implements, cannot be regarded as evidence that these two nations had a common origin, or even that intercommunication ever took place between them; seeing that the convenience of using calabashes or shells for such purposes, and the advantage of poking an enemy with a sharp stick, or hitting him with a heavy one, must be early forced by nature upon the mind of even the stupidest savage. And when he had found out the use of a stick, he would need no prompting to discover the value of a chipped or wetted stone, or an angular piece of native metal, for the same object. On the other hand, it may be doubted whether the chances are not greatly against independent peoples arriving at the manufacture of a boomerang, or of a bow; which last, if one comes to think of it, is a rather complicated apparatus; and the tracing of the distribution of inventions as complex as these, and of such strange customs as betel-chewing and tobacco-smoking, may afford valuable ethnological hints.
Since the time of Leibnitz, and guided by such men as Humboldt, Abel Remusat, and Klaproth, Philology has taken far higher ground. Thus Prichard affirms that “the history of nations, termed Ethnology, must be mainly founded on the relations of their languages.”
An eminent living philologer, August Schleicher, in a recent essay, puts forward the claims of his science still more forcibly:–
“If, however, language is the human [Greek: kat ezochhen], the suggestion arises whether it should not form the basis of any scientific systematic arrangement of mankind; whether the foundation of the natural classification of the genus Homo has not been discovered in it.
“How little constant are cranial peculiarities and other so-called race characters! Language, on the other hand, is always a perfectly constant diagnostic. A German may occasionally compete in hair and prognathism with a negro, but a negro language will never be his mother tongue. Of how little importance for mankind the so-called race characters are, is shown by the fact that speakers of languages belonging to one and the same linguistic family may exhibit the peculiarities of various races. Thus the settled Osmanli Turk exhibits Caucasian characters, while other so-called Tartaric Turks exemplify the Mongol type. On the other hand, the Magyar and the Basque do not depart in any essential physical peculiarity from the Indo-Germans, whilst the Magyar, Basque, and Indo-Germanic tongues are widely different. Apart from their inconstancy, again, the so-called race characters can hardly yield a scientifically natural system. Languages, on the other hand, readily fall into a natural arrangement, like that of which other vital products are susceptible, especially when viewed from their morphological side…. The externally visible structure of the cerebral and facial skeletons, and of the body generally, is less important than that no less material but infinitely more delicate corporeal structure, the function of which is speech. I conceive, therefore, that the natural classification of languages is also the natural classification of mankind. With language, moreover, all the higher manifestations of man’s vital activity are closely interwoven, so that these receive due recognition in and by that of speech.”[1]
[Footnote 1: August Schleicher. Ueber die Bedeutung der Sprache fuer die Naturgeschichte des Menschen, pp. 16-18. Weimar, 1858.]
Without the least desire to depreciate the value of philology as an adjuvant to ethnology, I must venture to doubt, with Rudolphi, Desmoulins, Crawfurd, and others, its title to the leading position claimed for it by the writers whom I have just quoted. On the contrary, it seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock, unless philologers are prepared to demonstrate, that no nation can lose its language and acquire that of a distinct nation, without a change of blood corresponding with the change of language. Desmoulins long ago put this argument exceedingly well:–
“Let us imagine the recurrence of one of those slow, or sudden, political revolutions, or say of those secular changes which among different people and at different epochs have annihilated historical monuments and even extinguished tradition. In that case, the evidence, now so clear, that the negroes of Hayti were slaves imported by a French colony, who, by the very effect of the subordination involved in slavery, lost their own diverse languages and adopted that of their masters, would vanish. And metaphysical philosophers, observing the identity of Haytian French with that spoken on the shores of the Seine and the Loire, would argue that the men of St. Domingo with woolly heads, black and oily skins, small calves, and slightly bent knees, are of the same race, descended from the same parental stock, as the Frenchmen with silky brown, chestnut, or fair hair, and white skins. For they would say, their languages are more similar than French is to German or Spanish.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Desmoulins, “Histoire Naturelle des Races Humaines,” p. 345. 1826.]
It must not be imagined that the case put by Desmoulins is a merely hypothetical one. Events precisely similar to the transport of a body of Africans to the West India Islands, indeed, cannot have happened among uncivilized races, but similar results have followed the importation of bodies of conquerors among an enslaved people over and over again. There is hardly a country in Europe in which two or more nations speaking widely different tongues have not become intermixed; and there is hardly a language of Europe of which we have any right to think that its structure affords a just indication of the amount of that intermixture.
As Dr. Latham has well said:–
“It is certain that the language of England is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and that the remains of the original Keltic are unimportant. It is by no means so certain that the blood of Englishmen is equally Germanic. A vast amount of Kelticism, not found in our tongue, very probably exists in our pedigrees. The ethnology of France is still more complicated. Many writers make the Parisian a Roman on the strength of his language; whilst others make him a Kelt on the strength of certain moral characteristics, combined with the previous Kelticism of the original Gauls. Spanish and Portuguese, as languages, are derivations from the Latin; Spain and Portugal, as countries, are Iberic, Latin, Gothic, and Arab, in different proportions. Italian is modern Latin all the world over; yet surely there must be much Keltic blood in Lombardy, and much Etruscan intermixture in Tuscany.
“In the ninth century every man between the Elbe and the Niemen spoke some Slavonic dialect; they now nearly all speak German. Surely the blood is less exclusively Gothic than the speech.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Latham, “Man and his Migrations,” p. 171.]
In other words, what philologer, if he had nothing but the vocabulary and grammar of the French and English languages to guide him, would dream of the real causes of the unlikeness of a Norman to a Provencal, of an Orcadian to a Cornishman? How readily might he be led to suppose that the different climatal conditions to which these speakers of one tongue have so long been exposed, have caused their physical differences; and how little would he suspect that these are due (as we happen to know they are) to wide differences of blood.
Few take duly into account the evidence which exists as to the ease with which unlettered savages gain or lose a language. Captain Erskine, in his interesting “Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific,” especially remarks upon the “avidity with which the inhabitants of the polyglot islands of Melanesia, from New Caledonia to the Solomon Islands, adopt the improvements of a more perfect language than their own, which different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;” and he adds that “among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found by us which did not possess, in some cases still imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition to their own, in which they reckon only to five.”
Yet how much philological reasoning in favour of the affinity or diversity of two distinct peoples has been based on the mere comparison of numerals!
But the most instructive example of the fallacy which may attach to merely philological reasonings, is that afforded by the Feejeans, who are, physically, so intimately connected with the adjacent Negritos of New Caledonia, &c., that no one can doubt to what stock they belong, and who yet, in the form and substance of their language, are Polynesian. The case is as remarkable as if the Canary Islands should have been found to be inhabited by negroes speaking Arabic, or some other clearly Semitic dialect, as their mother tongue. As it happens, the physical peculiarities of the Feejeans are so striking, and the conditions under which they live are so similar to those of the Polynesians, that no one has ventured to suggest that they are merely modified Polynesians–a suggestion which could otherwise certainly have been made. But if languages may be thus transferred from one stock to another, without any corresponding intermixture of blood, what ethnological value has philology?–what security does unity of language afford us that the speakers of that language may not have sprung from two, or three, or a dozen, distinct sources?
Thus we come, at last, to the purely zoological method, from which it is not unnatural to expect more than from any other, seeing that, after all, the problems of ethnology are simply those which are presented to the zoologist by every widely distributed animal he studies. The father of modern zoology seems to have had no doubt upon this point. At the twenty-eighth page of the standard twelfth edition of the “Systema Naturae,” in fact, we find:–
I. PRIMATES.
_Dentes primores incisores: superiores IV. paralleli, mammae pectorales II._
1. HOMO. Nosce te ipsum.
Sapiens. 1. H. diurnus: _varians cultura, loco._ _Ferus_. Tetrapus, mutus, hirsutus.
* * * * *
_Americanus_ [Greek: a]. Rufus, cholericus, rectus–_Pilis_ nigris, rectis, crassis–_Naribus_ patulis–_Facie_ ephelitica: _Mento_ subimberbi.
_Pertinax_, contentus, liber. _Pingit_ se lineis daedaleis rubris. _Regitur_ Consuetudine.
_Europaeus_ [Greek: b]. Albus sauguineus torosus. _Pilis_ flavescentibus, prolixis. _Oculis_ caeruleis.
_Levis_, argutus, inventor. _Tegitur_ Vestimentis arctis. _Regitur_ Ritibus.
_Asiaticus_ [Greek: g]. Luridus, melancholicus, rigidus. _Pilis_ nigricantibus. _Oculis_ fuscis. _Severus_, fastuosus, avarus. _Tegitur_ Indumentis laxis. _Regitur_ Opinionibus.
_Afer_ [Greek: d]. Niger, phlegmaticus, laxus. _Pilis_ atris, contortuplicatis. _Cute_ holosericea. _Naso_ simo. _Labiis_ tumidis. _Feminis_ sinus pudoris. _Mammae_ lactantes prolixae. _Vafer_, segnis, negligens. _Ungit_ se pingui. _Regitur_ Arbitrio.
_Monstrosus_ [Greek: e]. Solo (a) et arte (b c) variat.: a. _Alpini_ parvi, agiles, timidi. _Patagonici_ magni, segnes. b. _Monorchides_ ut minus fertiles: Hottentotti.
_Junceae_ puellae, abdomine attenuato: Europoeae.
c. _Macrocephali_ capiti conico: Chinenses. _Plagiocephali_ capite antice compresso: Canadenses.
Turn a few pages further on in the same volume, and there appears, with a fine impartiality in the distribution of capitals and sub-divisional headings:–
III. FERAE.
_Dentes primores superiores sex, acutiusculi. Canini solitarii._
* * * * *
12. CANIS. _Dentes primores_ superiores VI.: laterales longiores distantes: intermedii lobati. Inferiores VI.: laterales lobati. _Laniarii_ solitarii, incurvati. Molares VI. s. VII. (pluresve quam in reliquis).
_familiaris_ [Greek: i]. C. cauda (sinistrorsum) recurvata….
_domesticus_ [Greek: a]. auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata.
_sagax_ [Greek: b]. auriculis pendulis, digito spurio ad tibias posticas.
_grajus_ [Greek: g]. magnitudine lupi, trunco curvato, rostro attenuato, &c. &c.
Linnaeus’ definition of what he considers to be mere varieties of the species Man are, it will be observed, as completely free from any allusion to linguistic peculiarities as those brief and pregnant sentences in which he sketches the characters of the varieties of the species Dog. “Pilis nigris, naribus patulis” may be set against “auriculis erectis, cauda subtus lanata;” while the remarks on the morals and manners of the human subject seem as if they were thrown in merely by way of makeweight.
Buffon, Blumenbach (the founder of ethnology as a special science), Rudolphi, Bory de St. Vincent, Desmoulins, Cuvier, Retzius, indeed I may say all the naturalists proper, have dealt with man from a no less completely zoological point of view; while, as might have been expected, those who have been least naturalists, and most linguists, have most neglected the zoological method, the neglect culminating in those who have been altogether devoid of acquaintance with anatomy.
Prichard’s proposition, that language is more persistent than physical characters, is one which has never been proved, and indeed admits of no proof, seeing that the records of language do not extend so far as those of physical characters. But, until the superior tenacity of linguistic over physical peculiarities is shown, and until the abundant evidence which exists, that the language of a people may change without corresponding physical change in that people, is shown to be valueless, it is plain that the zoological court of appeal is the highest for the ethnologist, and that no evidence can be set against that derived from physical characters.
What, then, will a new survey of mankind from the Linnaean point of view teach us?
The great antipodal block of land we call Australia has, speaking roughly, the form of a vast quadrangle, 2,000 miles on the side, and extends from the hottest tropical, to the middle of the temperate, zone. Setting aside the foreign colonists introduced within the last century, it is inhabited by people no less remarkable for the uniformity, than for the singularity, of their physical characters and social state. For the most part of fair stature, erect and well built, except for an unusual slenderness of the lower limbs, the AUSTRALIANS have dark, usually chocolate-coloured skins; fine dark wavy hair; dark eyes, overhung by beetle brows; coarse, projecting jaws; broad and dilated, but not especially flattened, noses; and lips which, though prominent, are eminently flexible.
The skulls of these people are always long and narrow, with a smaller development of the frontal sinuses than usually corresponds with such largely developed brow ridges. An Australian skull of a round form, or one the transverse diameter of which exceeds eight-tenths of its length, has never been seen. These people, in a word, are eminently “dolichocephalic,” or long-headed; but, with this one limitation, their crania present considerable variations, some being comparatively high and arched, while others are more remarkably depressed than almost any other human skulls.
The female pelvis differs comparatively little from the European; but in the pelves of male Australians which I have examined, the antero-posterior and transverse diameters approach equality more nearly than is the case in Europeans.
No Australian tribe has ever been known to cultivate the ground, to use metals, pottery, or any kind of textile fabric. They rarely construct huts. Their means of navigation are limited to rafts or canoes, made of sheets of bark. Clothing, except skin cloaks for protection from cold, is a superfluity with which they dispense; and though they have some singular weapons, almost peculiar to themselves, they are wholly unacquainted with bows and arrows.
It is but a step, as it were, across Bass’s Straits to Tasmania. Neither climate nor the characteristic forms of vegetable or animal life change largely on the south side of the Straits, but the early voyagers found Man singularly different from him on the north side. The skin of the Tasmanian was dark, though he lived between parallels of latitude corresponding with those of middle Europe in our own hemisphere; his jaws projected, his head was long and narrow; his civilization was about on a footing with that of the Australian, if not lower, for I cannot discover that the Tasmanian understood the use of the throwing-stick. But he differed from the Australian in his woolly, negro-like hair, whence the name of NEGRITO, which has been applied to him and his congeners.
Such Negritos–differing more or less from the Tasmanian, but agreeing with him in dark skin and woolly hair–occupy New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, the Louisiade Archipelago; and stretching to the Papuan Islands, and for a doubtful extent beyond them to the north and west, form a sort of belt, or zone, of Negrito population, interposed between the Australians on the west and the inhabitants of the great majority of the Pacific islands on the east.
The cranial characters of the Negritos vary considerably more than those of their skin and hair, the most notable circumstance being the strong Australian aspect which distinguishes many Negrito skulls, while others tend rather towards forms common in the Polynesian islands.
In civilization, New Caledonia exhibits an advance upon Tasmania, and, farther north, there is a still greater improvement. But the bows and arrows, the perched houses, the outrigger canoes, the habits of betel-chewing and of kawa-drinking, which abound more or less among the northern Negritos, are probably to be regarded not as the products of an indigenous civilization, but merely as indications of the extent to which foreign influences have modified the primitive social state of these people.
From Tasmania or New Caledonia, to New Zealand or Tongataboo, is again but a brief voyage; but it brings about a still more notable change in the aspect of the indigenous population than that effected by the passage of Bass’s Straits. Instead of being chocolate-coloured people, the Maories and Tongans are light brown; instead of woolly, they have straight, or wavy, black hair. And if from New Zealand, we travel some 5,000 miles east to Easter Island; and from Easter Island, for as great a distance north-west, to the Sandwich Islands; and thence 7,000 miles, westward and southward, to Sumatra; and even across the Indian Ocean, into the interior of Madagascar, we shall everywhere meet with people whose hair is straight or wavy, and whose skins exhibit various shades of brown. These are the Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians, whom Latham has grouped together under the common title of AMPHINESIANS.
The cranial characters of these people, as of the Negritos, are less constant than those of their skin and hair. The Maori has a long skull; the Sandwich Islander a broad skull. Some, like these, have strong brow ridges; others, like the Dayaks and many Polynesians, have hardly any nasal indentation.
It is only in the westernmost parts of their area that the Amphinesian nations know anything about bows and arrows as weapons, or are acquainted with the use of metals or with pottery. Everywhere they cultivate the ground, construct houses, and skilfully build and manage outrigger, or double, canoes; while, almost everywhere, they use some kind of fabric for clothing.
Between Easter Island, or the Sandwich Islands, and any part of the American coast is a much wider interval than that between Tasmania and New Zealand, but the ethnological interval between the American and the Polynesian is less than that between either of the previously named stocks.
The typical AMERICAN has straight black hair and dark eyes, his skin exhibiting various shades of reddish or yellowish brown, sometimes inclining to olive. The face is broad and scantily bearded; the skull wide and high. Such people extend from Patagonia to Mexico, and much farther north along the west coast. In the main a race of hunters, they had nevertheless, at the time of the discovery of the Americas, attained a remarkable degree of civilization in some localities. They had domesticated ruminants, and not only practised agriculture, but had learned the value of irrigation. They manufactured textile fabrics, were masters of the potter’s art, and knew how to erect massive buildings of stone. They understood the working of the precious, though not of the useful, metals; and had even attained to a rude kind of hieroglyphic, or picture, writing.
The Americans not only employ the bow and arrow, but, like some Amphinesians, the blow-pipe, as offensive weapons: but I am not aware that the outrigger canoe has ever been observed among them.
I have reason to suspect that some of the Fuegian tribes differ cranially from the typical Americans; and the Northern and Eastern American tribes have longer skulls than their Southern compatriots. But the ESQUIMAUX, who roam on the desolate and ice-bound coasts of Arctic America, certainly present us with a new stock. The Esquimaux (among whom the Greenlanders are included), in fact, though they share the straight black hair of the proper Americans, are a duller complexioned, shorter, and more squat people, and they have still more prominent cheek-bones. But the circumstance which most completely separates them from the typical Americans, is the form of their skulls, which instead of being broad, high, and truncated behind, are eminently long, usually low, and prolonged backwards.
These Hyperborean people clothe themselves in skins, know nothing of pottery, and hardly anything of metals. Dependent for existence upon the produce of the chase, the seal and the whale are to them what the cocoa-nut tree and the plantain are to the savages of more genial climates. Not only are those animals meat and raiment, but they are canoes, sledges, weapons, tools, windows, and fire; while they support the dog, who is the indispensable ally and beast of burden of the Esquimaux.
It is admitted that the Tchuktchi, on the eastern side of Behring’s Straits, are, in all essential respects, Esquimaux; and I do not know that there is any satisfactory evidence to show that the Tunguses and Samoiedes do not essentially share the physical characters of the same people. Southward, there are indications of Esquimaux characters among the Japanese, and it is possible that their influence may be traced yet further.
However this may be, Eastern Asia, from Mantchouria to Siam, Thibet, and Northern Hindostan, is continuously inhabited by men, usually of short stature, with skins varying in colour from yellow to olive; with broad cheek-bones and faces that, owing to the insignificance of the nose, are exceedingly flat; and with small, obliquely-set, black eyes and straight black hair, which sometimes attains a very great length upon the scalp, but is always scanty upon the face and body. The skull is never much elongated, and is, generally, remarkably broad and rounded, with hardly any nasal depression, and but slight, if any, projection of the jaws.
Many of these people, for whom the old name of MONGOLIANS may be retained, are nomades; others, as the Chinese, have attained a remarkable and apparently indigenous civilization, only surpassed by that of Europe.
At the north-western extremity of Europe the Lapps repeat the characters of the Eastern Asiatics. Between these extreme points, the Mongolian stock is not continuous, but is represented by a chain of more or less isolated tribes, who pass under the name of Calmucks and Tartars, and form Mongolian islands, as it were, in the midst of an ocean of other people.
The waves of this ocean are the nations for whom, in order to avoid the endless confusion produced by our present half-physical, half-philological classification, I shall use a new name–XANTHOCHROI–indicating that they are “yellow” haired and “pale” in complexion. The Chinese historians of the Han dynasty, writing in the third century before our era, describe, with much minuteness, certain numerous and powerful barbarians with “yellow hair, green eyes, and prominent noses,” who, the black-haired, skew-eyed, and flat-nosed annalists remark in passing, are “just like the apes from whom they are descended.” These people held, in force, the upper waters of the Yenisei, and thence under various names stretched southward to Thibet and Kashgar. Fair-haired and blue-eyed northern enemies were no less known to the ancient Hindoos, to the Persians, and to the Egyptians, on the south of the great central Asiatic area; while the testimony of all European antiquity is to the effect that, before and since the period in question, there lay beyond the Danube, the Rhine, and the Seine, a vast and dangerous yellow or red haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed population. Whether the disturbers of the marches of the Roman Empire were called Gauls or Germans, Goths, Alans, or Scythians, one thing seems certain, that until the invasion of the Huns, they were tall, fair, blue-eyed men.
If any one should think fit to assume that in the year 100 B.C., there was one continuous Xanthochroic population from the Rhine to the Yenisei, and from the Ural mountains to the Hindoo Koosh, I know not that any evidence exists by which that position could be upset, while the existing state of things is rather in its favour than otherwise. For the Scandinavians, wholly, the Germans to a great extent, the Slavonian and the Finnish tribes, some of the inhabitants of Greece, many Turks, some Kirghis, and some Mantchous, the Ossetes in the Caucasus, the Siahposh, the Rohillas, are at the present day fair, yellow or red haired, and blue-eyed; and the interpolation of tribes of Mongolian hair and complexion, as far west as the Caspian Steppes and the Crimea, might justly be accounted for by those subsequent westward irruptions of the Mongolian stock, of which history furnishes abundant testimony.
The furthermost limit of the Xanthochroi north-westward is Iceland and the British Isles; south-westward, they are traceable at intervals through the Berber country, and end in the Canary Islands.
The cranial characters of the Xanthochroi are not, at present, strictly definable. The Scandinavians are certainly long-headed; but many Germans, the Swiss so far as they are Germanized, the Slavonians, the Fins, and the Turks, are short-headed. What were the cranial characters of the ancient “U-suns” and “Ting-lings” of the valley of the Yenisei is unknown.
West of the area occupied by the chief mass of the Xanthochroi, and north of the Sahara, is a broad belt of land, shaped like a =Y=. Between the forks of the =Y= lies the Mediterranean; the stem of it is Arabia. The stem is bathed by the Indian Ocean, the western ends of the forks by the Atlantic. The people inhabiting the area thus roughly sketched have, like the Xanthochroi, prominent noses, pale skins and wavy hair, with abundant beards; but, unlike them, the hair is black or dark, and the eyes usually so. They may thence be called the MELANOCHROI. Such people are found in the British Islands, in Western and Southern Gaul, in Spain, in Italy south of the Po, in parts of Greece, in Syria and Arabia, stretching as far northward and eastward as the Caucasus and Persia. They are the chief inhabitants of Africa north of the Sahara, and, like the Xanthochroi, they end in the Canary Islands. They are known as Kelts, Iberians, Etruscans, Romans, Pelasgians, Berbers, Semites. The majority of them are long-headed, and of smaller stature than the Xanthochroi.
It is needless to remark upon the civilization of these two great stocks. With them has originated everything that is highest in science, in art, in law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions. In their hands, at the present moment, lies the order of the social world, and to them its progress is committed.
South of the Atlas, and of the Great Desert, Middle Africa exhibits a new type of humanity in the NEGRO, with his dark skin, woolly hair, projecting jaws, and thick lips. As a rule, the skull of the Negro is remarkably long; it rarely approaches the broad type, and never exhibits the roundness of the Mongolian. A cultivator of the ground, and dwelling in villages; a maker of pottery, and a worker in the useful as well as the ornamental metals; employing the bow and arrow as well as the spear, the typical negro stands high in point of civilization above the Australian.
Resembling the Negroes in cranial characters, the BUSHMEN of South Africa differ from them in their yellowish brown skins, their tufted hair, their remarkably small stature, and their tendency to fatty and other integumentary outgrowths; nor is the wonderful click with which their speech is interspersed to be overlooked in enumerating the physical characteristics of this strange people.
The so-called “Drawidian” populations of Southern Hindostan lead us back, physically as well as geographically, towards the Australians; while the diminutive MINCOPIES of the Andaman Islands lie midway between the Negro and Negrito races, and, as Mr. Busk has pointed out, occasionally present the rare combination of Brachycephaly, or short-headedness, with woolly hair.
In the preceding progress along the outskirts of the habitable world, eleven readily distinguishable stocks, or persistent modifications, of mankind, have been recognized. I have purposely omitted such people as the Abyssinians and the Hindoos, who there is every reason to believe result from the intermixture of distinct stocks. Perhaps I ought, for like reasons, to have ignored the Mincopies. But I do not pretend that my enumeration is complete or, in any sense, perfect. It is enough for my purpose if it be admitted (and I think it cannot be denied) that those which I have mentioned exist, are well marked, and occupy the greater part of the habitable globe.
In attempting to classify these persistent modifications after the manner of naturalists, the first circumstance that attracts one’s attention is the broad contrast between the people with straight and wavy hair, and those with crisp, woolly, or tufted hair. Bory de St. Vincent, noting this fundamental distinction, divided mankind accordingly into the two primary groups of _Leiotrichi_ and _Ulotrichi_,–terms which are open to criticism, but which I adopt in the accompanying table, because they have been used. It is better for science to accept a faulty name which has the merit of existence, than to burthen it with a faultless newly invented one.
Under each of these divisions are two columns, one for the Brachycephali, or short heads, and one for the Dolichocephali[1], or long heads. Again, each column is subdivided transversely into four compartments, one for the “leucous,” people with fair complexions and yellow or red hair; one for the “leucomelanous,” with dark hair and pale skins; one for the “xanthomelanous,” with black hair and yellow, brown, or olive skins; and one for the “melanous,” with black hair and dark brown or blackish skins.
[Footnote 1: Skulls, the transverse diameter of which is more than eight-tenths the long diameter, are short; those which have the transverse diameter less than eight-tenths the longitudinal, are long.]
LEIOTRICHI. ULOTRICHI. ______________________________ ____________________________ / \ / \
Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Leucous.
…. Xanthochroi ….
Leucomelanous.
…. Melanochroi ….
Xanthomelanous.
_Esquimaux_. Mongolians. _Bushmen_. _Amphinesians_.
_Americans_.
Melanous.
_Australians_. Negroes. _Mincopies_(?) _Negritos_
NOTE: _The names of the stocks known only since the fifteenth century are put into italics. If the “Skraelings” of the Norse discoverers of America were Esquimaux, Europeans became acquainted with the latter six or seven centuries earlier_.
It is curious to observe that almost all the woolly-headed people are also long-headed; while among the straight-haired nations broad heads preponderate, and only two stocks, the Esquimaux and the Australians, are exclusively long-headed.
One of the acutest and most original of ethnologists, Desmoulins, originated the idea, which has subsequently been fully developed by Agassiz, that the distribution of the persistent modifications of man is governed by the same laws as that of other animals, and that both fall into the same great distributional provinces. Thus, Australia; America, south of Mexico; the Arctic regions; Europe, Syria, Arabia, and North Africa, taken together, are each regions eminently characterized by the nature of their animal and vegetable populations, and each, as we have seen, has its peculiar and characteristic form of man. But it may be doubted whether the parallel thus drawn will hold good strictly, and in all cases. The Tasmanian Fauna and Flora are essentially Australian, and the like is true to a less extent of many, if not of all, the Papuan islands; but the Negritos who inhabit these islands are strikingly different from the Australians. Again, the differences between the Mongolians and the Xanthochroi are out of all proportion greater than those between the Faunae and Florae of Central and Eastern Asia. But whatever the difficulties in the way of the detailed application of this comparison of the distribution of men with that of animals, it is well worthy of being borne in mind, and carried as far as it will go.
Apart from all speculation, a very curious fact regarding the distribution of the persistent modifications of mankind becomes apparent on inspecting an Ethnological chart, projected in such a manner that the Pacific Ocean occupies its centre. Such a chart exhibits an Australian area occupied by dark smooth-haired people, separated by an incomplete inner zone of dark woolly-haired Negritos and Negroes, from an outer zone of comparatively pale and smooth-haired men, occupying the Americas, and nearly all Asia and North Africa.
Such is a brief sketch of the characters and distribution of the persistent modifications, or stocks, of mankind at the present day. If we seek for direct evidence of how long this state of things has lasted, we shall find little enough, and that little far from satisfactory. Of the eleven different stocks enumerated, seven have been known to us for less than 400 years; and of these seven not one possessed a fragment of written history at the time it came into contact with European civilization. The other four–the Negroes, Mongolians, Xanthochroi, and Melanochroi–have always existed in some of the localities in which they are now found, nor do the negroes ever seem to have voluntarily travelled beyond the limits of their present area. But ancient history is in a great measure the record of the mutual encroachments of the other three stocks.
On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little change has been effected by these mutual invasions and intermixtures. As at the present time, so at the dawn of history, the Melanochroi fringed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; the Xanthochroi occupied most of Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and Central Asia; while Mongolians held the extreme east of the Old World. So far as history teaches us, the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were, twenty centuries ago, just what they are now, in their broad features and general distribution.
The evidence yielded by Archaeology is not very definite, but, so far as it goes, it is to much the same effect. The mound builders of Central America seem to have had the characteristic short and broad head of the modern inhabitants of that continent. The tumuli and tombs of Ancient Scandinavia, of pre-Roman Britain, of Gaul, of Switzerland, reveal two types of skull–a broad and a long–of which, in Scandinavia, the broad seems to have belonged to the older stock, while the reverse was probably the case in Britain, and certainly in Switzerland. It has been assumed that the broad-skulled people of ancient Scandinavia were Lapps; but there is no proof of the fact, and they may have been, like the broad-skulled Swiss and Germans, Xanthochroi. One of the greatest of ethnological difficulties is to know where the modern Swedes, Norsemen, and Saxons got their long heads, as all their neighbours, Fins, Lapps, Slavonians, and South Germans, are broad-headed. Again, who were the small-handed, long-headed people of the “bronze epoch,” and what has become of the infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi?
At present Palaeontology yields no safe data to the ethnologist. We know absolutely nothing of the ethnological characters of the men of Abbeville and Hoxne; but must be content with the demonstration, in itself of immense value, that Man existed in Western Europe when its physical condition was widely different from what it is now, and when animals existed, which, though they belong to what is, properly speaking, the present order of things, have long been extinct. Beyond the limits of a fraction of Europe, Palaeontology tells us nothing of man or of his works.
To sum up our knowledge of the ethnological past of man: so far as the light is bright, it shows him substantially as he is now; and, when it grows dim, it permits us to see no sign that he was other than he is now.
It is a general belief that men of different stocks differ as much physiologically as they do morphologically; but it is very hard to prove, in any particular case, how much of a supposed national characteristic is due to inherent physiological peculiarities, and how much to the influence of circumstances. There is much evidence to show, however, that some stocks enjoy a partial or complete immunity from diseases which destroy, or decimate, others. Thus there seems good ground for the belief that Negroes are remarkably exempt from yellow fever; and that, among Europeans, the melanochrous people are less obnoxious to its ravages than the xanthochrous. But many writers, not content with physiological differences of this kind, undertake to prove the existence of others of far greater moment; and, indeed, to show that certain stocks of mankind exhibit, more or less distinctly, the physiological characters of true species. Unions between these stocks, and still more between the half-breeds arising from their mixture, are affirmed to be either infertile, or less fertile than those which take place between males and females of either stock under the same circumstances. Some go so far as to assert that no mixed breeds of mankind can maintain themselves without the assistance of one or other of the parent stocks, and that, consequently, they must inevitably be obliterated in the long run.
Here, again, it is exceedingly difficult to obtain trustworthy evidence, and to free the effects of the pure physiological experiment from adventitious influences. The only trial which, by a strange chance, was kept clear of all such influences–the only instance in which two distinct stocks of mankind were crossed, and their progeny intermarried without any admixture from without–is the famous case of the Pitcairn Islanders, who were the progeny of Bligh’s English sailors by Tahitian women. The results of this experiment, as everybody knows, are dead against those who maintain the doctrine of human hybridity, seeing that the Pitcairn Islanders, even though they necessarily contracted consanguineous marriages, throve and multiplied exceedingly.
But those who are disposed to believe in this doctrine should study the evidence brought forward in its support by M. Broca, its latest and ablest advocate, and compare this evidence with that which the botanists, as represented by a Gaertner, or by a Darwin, think it indispensable to obtain before they will admit the infertility of crosses between two allied kinds of plants. They will then, I think, be satisfied that the doctrine in question rests upon a very unsafe foundation; that the facts adduced in its support are capable of many other interpretations; and, indeed, that from the very nature of the case, demonstrative evidence one way or the other is almost unattainable. _A priori_, I should be disposed to expect a certain amount of infertility between some of the extreme modifications of mankind; and still more between the offsprings of their intermixture. _A posteriori_, I cannot discover any satisfactory proof that such infertility exists.
From the facts of ethnology I now turn to the theories and speculations of ethnologists, which have been devised to explain these facts, and to furnish satisfactory answers to the inquiry–what conditions have determined the existence of the persistent modifications of mankind, and have caused their distribution to be what it is?
These speculations may be grouped under three heads: firstly, the Monogenist hypotheses; secondly, those of the Polygenists; and thirdly, that which would result from a simple application of Darwinian principles to mankind.
According to the Monogenists, all mankind have sprung from a single pair, whose multitudinous progeny spread themselves over the world, such as it now is, and became modified into the forms we meet with in the various regions of the earth, by the effect of the climatal and other conditions to which they were subjected.
The advocates of this hypothesis are divisible into several schools. There are those who represent the most numerous, respectable, and would-be orthodox of the public, and are what may be called “Adamites,” pure and simple. They believe that Adam was made out of earth somewhere in Asia, about six thousand years ago; that Eve was modelled from one of his ribs; and that the progeny of these two having been reduced to the eight persons who were landed on the summit of Mount Ararat after an universal deluge, all the nations of the earth have proceeded from these last, have migrated to their present localities, and have become converted into Negroes, Australians, Mongolians, &c., within that time. Five-sixths of the public are taught this Adamitic Monogenism, as if it were an established truth, and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of science, or duly instructed person, who does.
A second school of monogenists, not worthy of much attention, attempts to hold a place midway between the Adamites and a third division, who take up a purely scientific position, and require to be dealt with accordingly. This third division, in fact, numbers in its ranks Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Prichard, and many distinguished living ethnologists.
These “Rational Monogenists,” or, at any rate, the more modern among them, hold, firstly, that the present condition of the earth has existed for untold ages; secondly, that, at a remote period, beyond the ken of Archbishop Usher, man was created, somewhere between the Caucasus and the Hindoo Koosh; thirdly, that he might have migrated thence to all parts of the inhabited world, seeing that none of them are unattainable from some other inhabited part, by men provided with only such means of transport as savages are known to possess and must have invented; fourthly, that the operation of the existing diversities of climate and other conditions upon people so migrating, is sufficient to account for all the diversities of mankind.
Of the truth of the first of these propositions no competent judge now entertains any doubt. The second is more open to discussion, for in these latter days many question the special creation of man: and even if his special creation be granted, there is not a shadow of a reason why he should have been created in Asia rather than anywhere else. Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the “Caucasian mystery,” invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. A Georgian woman’s skull was the handsomest in his collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the prototypic “Adamic” man, and his country the primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average form, but distinctly belongs to the brachycephalic group.
With the third proposition I am quite disposed to agree, though it must be recollected that it is one thing to allow that a given migration is possible, and another to admit there is good reason to believe it has really taken place.
But I can find no sufficient ground for accepting the fourth proposition; and I doubt if it would ever have obtained its general currency except for the circumstance that fair Europeans are very readily tanned and embrowned by the sun. But I am not aware that there is a particle of proof that the cutaneous change thus effected can become hereditary, any more than that the enlarged livers, which plague our countrymen in India, can be transmitted;–while there is very strong evidence to the contrary. Not only, in fact, are there such cases as those of the English families in Barbadoes, who have remained for six generations unaltered in complexion, but which are open to the objection that they may have received infusions of fresh European blood; but there is the broad fact, that not a single indigenous Negro exists either in the great alluvial plains of tropical South America, or in the exposed islands of the Polynesian Archipelago, or among the populations of equatorial Borneo or Sumatra. No satisfactory explanation of these obvious difficulties has been offered by the advocates of the direct influence of conditions. And as for the more important modifications observed in the structure of the brain, and in the form of the skull, no one has ever pretended to show in what way they can be effected directly by climate.
It is here, in fact, that the strength of the Polygenists, or those who maintain that men primitively arose, not from one, but from many stocks, lies. Show us, they say to the Monogenists, a single case in which the characters of a human stock have been essentially modified without its being demonstrable, or, at least, highly probable, that there has been intermixture of blood with some foreign stock. Bring forward any instance in which a part of the world, formerly inhabited by one stock, is now the dwelling-place of another, and we will prove the change to be the result of migration, or of intermixture, and not of modification of character by climatic influences. Finally, prove to us that the evidence in favour of the specific distinctness of many animals, admitted to be distinct species by all zoologists, is a whit better than that upon which we maintain the specific distinctness of men.
If presenting unanswerable objections to your adversary were the same thing as proving your own case, the Polygenists would be in a fair way towards victory; but, unfortunately, as I have already observed, they have as yet completely failed to adduce satisfactory positive proof of the specific diversity of mankind. Like the Monogenists, the Polygenists are of several sects; some imagine that their assumed species of mankind were created where we find them–the African in Africa, and the Australian in Australia, along with the other animals of their distributional province; others conceive that each species of man has resulted from the modification of some antecedent species of ape–the American from the broad-nosed Simians of the New World, the African from the Troglodytic stock, the Mongolian from the Orangs.
The first hypothesis is hardly likely to win much favour. The whole tendency of modern science is to thrust the origination of things further and further into the background; and the chief philosophical objection to Adam being, not his oneness, but the hypothesis of his special creation; the multiplication of that objection tenfold is, whatever it may look, an increase, instead of a diminution, of the difficulties of the case. And, as to the second alternative, it may safely be affirmed that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are so small, that the assumption of more than one primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. Surely no one can now be found to assert that any two stocks of mankind differ as much as a chimpanzee and an orang do; still less that they are as unlike as either of these is to any New World Simian!
Lastly, the granting of the Polygenist premises does not, in the slightest degree, necessitate the Polygenist conclusion. Admit that Negroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct species, or distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primaeval parents of all mankind.
It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery: it is he who, coming forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents his doctrine as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools.
It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his views to ethnology; but even he who “runs and reads” the “Origin of Species” can hardly fail to do so; and, furthermore, Mr. Wallace and M. Pouchet have recently treated of ethnological questions from this point of view. Let me, in conclusion, add my own contribution to the same store.
I assume Man to have arisen in the manner which I have discussed elsewhere, and probably, though by no means necessarily, in one locality. Whether he arose singly, or a number of examples appeared contemporaneously, is also an open question for the believer in the production of species by the gradual modification of pre-existing ones. At what epoch of the world’s history this took place, again, we have no evidence whatever. It may have been in the older tertiary, or earlier, but what is most important to remember is, that the discoveries of late years have proved that man inhabited Western Europe, at any rate, before the occurrence of those great physical changes which have given Europe its present aspect. And as the same evidence shows that man was the contemporary of animals which are now extinct, it is not too much to assume that his existence dates back at least as far as that of our present Fauna and Flora, or before the epoch of the drift.
But if this be true, it is somewhat startling to reflect upon the prodigious changes which have taken place in the physical geography of this planet since man has been an occupant of it.
During that period the greater part of the British islands, of Central Europe, of Northern Asia, have been submerged beneath the sea and raised up again. So has the great desert of Sahara, which occupies the major part of Northern Africa. The Caspian and the Aral seas have been one, and their united waters have probably communicated with both the Arctic and the Mediterranean oceans. The greater part of North America has been under water, and has emerged. It is highly probable that a large part of the Malayan Archipelago has sunk, and its primitive continuity with Asia has been destroyed. Over the great Polynesian area subsidence has taken place to the extent of many thousands of feet–subsidence of so vast a character, in fact, that if a continent like Asia had once occupied the area of the Pacific, the peaks of its mountains would now show not more numerous than the islands of the Polynesian Archipelago.
What lands may have been thickly populated for untold ages, and subsequently have disappeared and left no sign above the waters, it is of course impossible for us to say; but unless we are to make the wholly unjustifiable assumption that no dry land rose elsewhere when our present dry land sank, there must be half-a-dozen Atlantises beneath the waves of the various oceans of the world. But if the regions which have undergone these slow and gradual, but immense alterations, were wholly or in part inhabited before the changes I have indicated began–and it is more probable that they were, than that they were not–what a wonderfully efficient “Emigration Board” must have been at work all over the world long before canoes, or even rafts, were invented; and before men were impelled to wander by any desire nobler or stronger than hunger. And as these rude and primitive families were thrust, in the course of long series of generations, from land to land, impelled by encroachments of sea or of marsh, or by severity of summer heat or winter cold, to change their positions, what opportunities must have been offered for the play of natural selection, in preserving one family variation and destroying another!
Suppose, for example, that some families of a horde which had reached a land charged with the seeds of yellow fever, varied in the direction of woolliness of hair and darkness of skin. Then, if it be true that these physical characters are accompanied by comparative or absolute exemptions from that scourge, the inevitable tendency would be to the preservation and multiplication of the darker and woollier families, and the elimination of the whiter and smoother-haired. In fact, by the operation of causes precisely similar to those which, in the famous instance cited by Mr. Darwin, have given rise to a race of black pigs in the forests of Louisiana, a negro stock would eventually people the region.
Again, how often, by such physical changes, must a stock have been isolated from all others for innumerable generations, and have found ample time for the hereditary hardening of its special peculiarities into the enduring characters of a persistent modification.
Nor, if it be true that the physiological difference of species may be produced by variation and natural selection, as Mr. Darwin supposes, would it be at all astonishing if, in some of these separated stocks, the process of differentiation should have gone so far as to give rise to the phenomena of hybridity. In the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the unity of the origin of mankind afforded by anatomical considerations, satisfactory proof of the existence of any degree of sterility in the unions of members of two of the “persistent modifications” of mankind, might well be appealed to by Mr. Darwin as crucial evidence of the truth of his views regarding the origin of species in general.
VIII.
ON SOME FIXED POINTS IN BRITISH ETHNOLOGY.
In view of the many discussions to which the complicated problems offered by the ethnology of the British Islands have given rise, it may be useful to attempt to pick out, from amidst the confused masses of assertion and of inference, those propositions which appear to rest upon a secure foundation, and to state the evidence by which they are supported. Such is the purpose of the present paper.
Some of these well-based propositions relate to the physical characters of the people of Britain and their neighbours; while others concern the languages which they spoke. I shall deal, in the first place, with the physical questions.
I. _Eighteen hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised people of two types of complexion–the one fair, and the other dark. The dark people resembled the Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair people were like the Belgic Gauls._
The chief direct evidence of the truth of this proposition is the well-known passage of Tacitus:–
“Ceterum Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indigenae an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertum. Habitus corporum varii: atque ex eo argumenta: nam rutilae Caledoniam habitantium comae, magni artus Germanicam originem asseverant. Silurum colorati vultus et torti plerumque crines, et posita contra Hispaniam, Iberos veteres trajecisse, easque sedes occupasse, fidem faciunt. Proximi Gallis et similes sunt; seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris, positio coeli corporibus habitum dedit. In universum tamen aestimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupasse, credibile est; eorum sacra deprehendas, superstitionum persuasione; sermo haud multum diversus.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Taciti Agricola, c. 11.]
This passage, it will be observed, contains statements as to facts, and certain conclusions deduced from these facts. The matters of fact asserted are: firstly, that the inhabitants of Britain exhibit much diversity in their physical characters; secondly, that the Caledonians are red-haired and large-limbed, like the Germans; thirdly, that the Silures have curly hair and dark complexions, like the people of Spain; fourthly, that the British people nearest Gaul resemble the “Galli.”
Tacitus, therefore, states positively what the Caledonians and Silures were like; but the interpretation of what he says about the other Britons must depend upon what we learn from other sources as to the characters of these “Galli.” Here the testimony of “divus Julius” comes in with great force and appropriateness. Caesar writes:–
“Britanniae pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in insula ipsi memoria proditum dicunt: marituma pars ab iis, qui predae ac belli inferendi causa ex Belgio transierant; qui omnes fere iis nominibus civitatum appellantur quibus orti ex civitatibus eo pervenerunt, et bello inlato ibi permanserunt atque agros colere coeperunt.”[1]
[Footnote 1: De Bello Gallico, v. 12.]
From these passages it is obvious that in the opinion of Caesar and Tacitus, the southern Britons resembled the northern Gauls, and especially the Belgae; and the evidence of Strabo is decisive as to the characters in which the two people resembled one another: “The men (of Britain) are taller than the Kelts, with hair less yellow; they are slighter in their persons.”[1]
[Footnote 1: “The Geography of Strabo.” Translated by Hamilton and Falconer; v. 5.]
The evidence adduced appears to leave no reasonable ground for doubting that, at the time of the Roman conquest, Britain contained people of two types, the one dark and the other fair complexioned, and that there was a certain difference between the latter in the north and in the south of Britain: the northern folk being, in the judgment of Tacitus, or, more properly, according to the information he had received from Agricola and others, more similar to the Germans than the latter. As to the distribution of these stocks, all that is clear is, that the dark people were predominant in certain parts of the west of the southern half of Britain, while the fair stock appears to have furnished the chief elements of the population elsewhere.
No ancient writer troubled himself with measuring skulls, and therefore there is no direct evidence as to the cranial characters of the fair and the dark stocks. The indirect evidence is not very satisfactory. The tumuli of Britain of pre-Roman date have yielded two extremely different forms of skull, the one broad and the other long; and the same variety has been observed in the skulls of the ancient Gauls[1]. The suggestion is obvious that the one form of skull may have been associated with the fair, and the other with the dark, complexion. But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by the reflection that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to be met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and of Scandinavia at the present day–the south-western Germans and the Swiss being markedly broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predominantly long-headed.
[Footnote 1: See Dr. Thurnam “On the Two principal Forms of Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls.”]
What the natives of Ireland were like at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, and for centuries afterwards, we have no certain knowledge; but the earliest trustworthy records prove the existence, side by side with one another, of a fair and a dark stock, in Ireland as in Britain. The long form of skull is predominant among the ancient, as among modern, Irish.
II. _The people termed Gauls, and those called Germans, by the Romans, did not differ in any important physical character._
The terms in which the ancient writers describe both Gauls and Germans are identical. They are always tall people, with massive limbs, fair skins, fierce blue eyes, and hair the colour of which ranges from red to yellow. Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be found between the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, so far as their characters are recorded by the old historians; and he proves his case by citations from a cloud of witnesses.
An attempt has been made to show that the colour of the hair of the Gauls must have differed very much from that which obtained among the Germans, on the strength of the story told by Suetonius (Caligula, 4), that Caligula tried to pass off Gauls for Germans by picking out the tallest, and making them “rutilare et summittere comam.”
The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this passage:–
“It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that Caligula got up this military comedy. And the fact proves that the Belgae were already sensibly different from their ancestors, whom Strabo had found almost identical with their _brothers_ on the other side of the Rhine.”
But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, proves nothing; for the Germans themselves were in the habit of reddening their hair. Ammianus Marcellinus[1] tells how, in the year 367 A.D., the Roman commander, Jovinus, surprised a body of Alemanni near the town now called Charpeigne, in the valley of the Moselle; and how the Roman soldiers, as, concealed by the thick wood, they stole upon their unsuspecting enemies, saw that some were bathing and others “comas rutilantes ex more.” More than two centuries earlier Pliny gives indirect evidence to the same effect when he says of soap:–
[Footnote 1: Res Gestae, xxvii.]
“Galliarum hoc inventum rutilandis capillis … apud Germanos majore in usu viris quam foeminis.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Historia Naturalis, xxviii. 51.]
Here we have a writer who flourished only a short time after the date of the Caligula story, telling us that the Gauls invented soap for the purpose of doing that which, according to Suetonius, Caligula forced them to do. And, further, the combined and independent testimony of Pliny and Ammianus assures us that the Germans were as much in the habit of reddening their hair as the Gauls. As to De Belloguet’s supposition that, even in Caligula’s time, the Gauls had become darker than their ancestors were, it is directly contradicted by Ammianus Marcellinus, who knew the Gauls well. “Celsioris staturae et candidi poene Galli sunt onions, et rutili, luminumque torvitate terribiles,” is his description; and it would fit the Gauls who sacked Rome.
III. _In none of the invasions of Britain which have taken place since the Roman dominion, has any other type of man been introduced than one or other of the two which existed during that dominion_.
The North Germans, who effected what is commonly called the Saxon conquest of Britain, were, most assuredly, a fair, yellow, or red-haired, blue eyed, long-skulled people. So were the Danes and the Norsemen who followed them; though it is very possible that the active slave trade which went on, and the intercourse with Ireland, may have introduced a certain admixture of the dark stock into both Denmark and Norway. The Norman conquest brought in new ethnological elements, the precise value of which cannot be estimated with exactness; but as to their quality, there can be no question, inasmuch as even the wide area from which William drew his followers could yield him nothing but the fair and the dark types of men, already present in Britain. But whether the Norman settlers, on the whole, strengthened the fair or the dark element, is a problem, the elements of the solution of which are not attainable.
I am unable to discover any grounds for believing that a Lapp element has ever entered into the population of these islands. So far as the physical evidence goes, it is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that the only constituent stocks of that population, now, or at any other period about which we have evidence, are the dark whites, whom I have proposed to call “_Melanochroi_” and the fair whites, or “_Xanthochroi._”
IV. _The Xanthochroi and the Melanochroi of Britain are, speaking broadly, distributed, at present, as they were in the time of Tacitus; and their representatives on the continent of Europe have the same general distribution as at the earliest period of which we have any record._
At the present day, and notwithstanding the extensive intermixture effected by the movements consequent on civilization and on political changes, there is a predominance of dark men in the west, and of fair men in the east and north, of Britain. At the present day, as from the earliest times, the predominant constituents of the riverain population of the North Sea and the eastern half of the British Channel, are fair men. The fair stock continues in force through Central Europe, until it is lost in Central Asia. Offshoots of this stock extend into Spain, Italy, and Northern India, and by way of Syria and North Africa, to the Canary Islands. They were known in very early times to the Chinese, and in still earlier to the ancient Egyptians, as frontier tribes. The Thracians were notorious for their fair hair and blue eyes many centuries before our era.
On the other hand, the dark stock predominates in Southern and Western France, in Spain, along the Ligurian shore, and in Western and Southern Italy; in Greece, Asia, Syria, and North Africa; in Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and Hindostan, shading gradually, through all stages of darkening, into the type of the modern Egyptian, or of the wild Hill-man of the Dekkan. Nor is there any record of the existence of a different population in all these countries.
The extreme north of Europe, and the northern part of Western Asia, are at present occupied by a Mongoloid stock, and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, may be assumed to have been so peopled from a very remote epoch. But, as I have said, I can find no evidence that this stock ever took part in peopling Britain. Of the three great stocks of mankind which extend from the western coast of the great Eurasiatic continent to its southern and eastern shores, the Mongoloids occupy a vast triangle, the base of which is the whole of Eastern Asia, while its apex lies in Lapland. The Melanochroi, on the other hand, may be represented as a broad band stretching from Ireland to Hindostan; while the Xanthochroic area lies between the two, thins out, so to speak, at either end, and mingles, at its margins, with both its neighbours.
Such is a brief and summary statement of what I believe to be the chief facts relating to the physical ethnology of the people of Britain. The conclusions which I draw from these and other facts are (1) That the Melanochroi and the Xanthochroi are two separate races in the biological sense of the word race; (2) That they have had the same general distribution as at present from the earliest times of which any record exists on the continent of Europe; (3) That the population of the British Islands is derived from them, and from them only.
The people of Europe, however, owe their national names, not to their physical characteristics, but to their languages, or to their political relations; which, it is plain, need not have the slightest relation to these characteristics.
Thus, it is quite certain that, in Caesar’s time, Gaul was divided politically into three nationalities–the Belgae, the Celtae, and the Aquitani; and that the last were very widely different, both in language and in physical characteristics, from the two former. The Belgae and the Celtae, on the other hand, differed comparatively little either in physique or in language. On the former point there is the distinct testimony of Strabo; as to the latter, St. Jerome states that the “Galatians had almost the same language as the Treviri.” Now, the Galatians were emigrant Volcae Tectosages, and therefore Celtae; while the Treviri were Belgae.
At the present day, the physical characters of the people of Belgic Gaul remain distinct from those of the people of Aquitaine, notwithstanding the immense changes which have taken place since Caesar’s time; but Belgae, Celtae, and Aquitani (all but a mere fraction of the last two, represented by the Basques and the Britons) are fused into one nationality, “le peuple Francais.” But they have adopted the language of one set of invaders, and the name of another; their original names and languages having almost disappeared. Suppose that the French language remained as the sole evidence of the existence of the population of Gaul, would the keenest philologer arrive at any other conclusion than that this population was essentially and fundamentally a “Latin” race, which had had some communication with Celts and Teutons? Would he so much as suspect the former existence of the Aquitani?
Community of language testifies to close contact between the people who speak the language, but to nothing else; philology has absolutely nothing to do with ethnology, except so far as it suggests the existence or the absence of such contact. The contrary assumption, that language is a test of race, has introduced the utmost confusion into ethnological speculation, and has nowhere worked greater scientific and practical mischief than in the ethnology of the British Islands.
What is known, for certain, about the languages spoken in these islands and their affinities may, I believe, be summed up as follows:–
I. _At the time of the Roman conquest, one language, the Celtic, under two principal dialectical divisions, the Cymric and the Gaelic, was spoken throughout the British Islands. Cymric was spoken in Britain, Gaelic in Ireland._
If a language allied to Basque had in earlier times been spoken in the British Islands, there is no evidence that any Euskarian-speaking people remained at the time of the Roman conquest. The dark and the fair population of Britain alike spoke Celtic tongues, and therefore the name “Celt” is as applicable to the one as to the other.
What was spoken in Ireland can only be surmised by reasoning from the knowledge of later times; but there seems to be no doubt that it was Gaelic; and that the Gaelic dialect was introduced into the Western Highlands by Irish invaders.
II. _The Belgae and the Celtae, with the offshoots of the latter in Asia Minor, spoke dialects of the Cymric division of Celtic_.
The evidence of this proposition lies in the statement of St. Jerome before cited; in the similarity of the names of places in Belgic Gaul and in Britain; and in the direct comparison of sundry ancient Gaulish and Belgic words which have been preserved, with the existing Cymric dialects, for which I must refer to the learned work of Brandes.
Formerly, as at the present day, the Cymric dialects of Celtic were spoken by both the fair and the dark stocks.
III. _There is no record of Gaelic being spoken anywhere save in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man_.
This appears to be the final result of the long discussions which have taken place on this much-debated question. As is the case with the Cymric dialects, Gaelic is now spoken by both dark and fair stocks.
IV. _When the Teutonic languages first became known, they were spoken only Xanthochroi, that is to say, by the Germans, the Scandinavians, and Goths. And they were imported by Xanthochroi into Gaul and into Britain._
In Gaul the imported Teutonic dialect has been completely overpowered by the more or less modified Latin, which it found already in possession; and what Teutonic blood there may be in modern Frenchmen is not adequately represented in their language. In Britain, on the contrary, the Teutonic dialects have overpowered the pre-existing forms of speech, and the people are vastly less “Teutonic” than their language. Whatever may have been the extent to which the Celtic-speaking population of the eastern half of Britain was trodden out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking Saxons and Danes, it is quite certain that no considerable displacement of the Celtic-speaking people occurred in Cornwall, Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland; and that nothing approaching to the extinction of that people took place in Devonshire, Somerset, or the western moiety of Britain generally. Nevertheless, the fundamentally Teutonic English language is now spoken throughout Britain, except by an insignificant fraction of the population in Wales and the Western Highlands. But it is obvious that this fact affords not the slightest justification for the common practice of speaking of the present inhabitants of Britain as an “Anglo-Saxon” people. It is, in fact, just as absurd as the habit of talking of the French people as a “Latin” race, because they speak a language which is, in the main, derived from Latin. And the absurdity becomes the more patent when those who have no hesitation in calling a Devonshire man, or a Cornish man, an “Anglo-Saxon,” would think it ridiculous to call a Tipperary man by the same title, though he and his forefathers may have spoken English for as long a time as the Cornish man.
Ireland, at the earliest period of which we have any knowledge, contained like Britain, a dark and a fair stock, which, there is every reason to believe, were identical with the dark and the fair stocks of Britain. When the Irish first became known they spoke a Gaelic dialect, and though, for many centuries, Scandinavians made continual incursions upon, and settlements among them, the Teutonic languages made no more way among the Irish than they did among the French. How much Scandinavian blood was introduced there is no evidence to show. But after the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., the English people, consisting in part of the descendants of Cymric speakers, and in part of the descendants of Teutonic speakers, made good their footing in the eastern half of the island, as the Saxons and Danes made good theirs in England; and did their best to complete the parallel by attempting the extirpation of the Gaelic-speaking Irish. And they succeeded to a considerable extent; a large part of Eastern Ireland is now peopled by men who are substantially English by descent, and the English language has spread over the land far beyond the limits of English blood.
Ethnologically, the Irish people were originally, like the people of Britain, a mixture of Melanochroi and Xanthochroi. They resembled the Britons in speaking a Celtic tongue; but it was a Gaelic and not a Cymric form of the Celtic language. Ireland was untouched by the Roman conquest, nor do the Saxons seem to have had any influence upon her destinies, but the Danes and Norsemen poured in a contingent of Teutonism, which has been largely supplemented by English and Scotch efforts.
What, then, is the value of the ethnological difference between the Englishman of the western half of England and the Irishman of the eastern half of Ireland? For what reason does the one deserve the name of a “Celt,” and not the other? And further, if we turn to the inhabitants of the western half of Ireland, why should the term “Celts” be applied to them more than to the inhabitants of Cornwall? And if the name is applicable to the one as justly as to the other, why should not intelligence, perseverance, thrift, industry, sobriety, respect for law, be admitted to be Celtic virtues? And why should we not seek for the cause of their absence in something else than the idle pretext of “Celtic blood?”
I have been unable to meet with any answers to these questions.