in which his testimony has been treated by some recent writers impugns nothing but the scholarship of the cavillers.

I do not say that there are no ethnological facts—it may be that we occasionally find ethnological theories—in the Greek writers subsequent; I only state that they by no means answer the expectations raised by the names of the authors, and the opportunities afforded by the nature of their subjects. Something is found in Hippocrates in the way of theory as to the effect of external condition, something in Aristotle, something in Plato—nothing, however, by which we find the study of Man as an animal recognized as a separate substantive branch of study. More than this—in works where the description of new populations was especially called for, and where the evidence of the writer would have been of the most unexceptionable kind, we find infinitely less than there ought to be. How little we learn of Persia from the Cyropædia, or of Armenia from the Anabasis—yet how easily might Xenophon have told us much!

Amongst the successors of Aristotle, we find none who writes a treatise περὶ βαρβάρων—yet how natural the subject, and how great the opportunities!—great, because of the commerce of the Euxine, and the institution of domestic slavery: the one conducting the merchant to the extreme Tanais, the other filling Athens with Thracians, and Asia Minor with Africans. The advantages which the Greeks of the age of Pericles neglected, are the advantages which the Brazilian Portuguese neglect at present, and which, until lately, both the English and the States-men of America neglected also. And the loss has been great. Like time and tide, ethnology waits for no man; and, even as the Indian of America disappears before the European, so did certain populations of antiquity. The process of extinction and amalgamation is as old as history; and whole families have materially altered in character since the beginning of the historical period. The present population of Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Moldavia is of recent introduction. What was the ancient? “Thracians and Getæ” is the answer. But what were they? “Germans,” says one writer; “Slavonians,” another; “an extinct race,” another. So that there is doubt and difference of opinion. Yet we know some little about them in other respects. We know their political relations; a little of their creed, and manners; the names of some of their tribes. Their place in the classification of the varieties of our species we do not know; and this is because, though the Greeks wrote the civil, they neglected the physical history of Man.

Thrace, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus—these are the areas for which the ancients might easily have left descriptions, and for which they neglected to do so; the omission being irreparable.

The opportunities of the Roman were greater than those of the Greek; and they were better used. Dissertations, distantly approaching the character of physical history, occur in even the pure historical writers of Greece, I allude more especially to the sketch of the manners and migrations of the ancient Greeks in the first, and the history of the Greek colonization of Sicily in the sixth book of Thucydides. Parallels to these re-appear in the Roman writers; and, in some cases, their proportion to the rest of the work is considerable. Sallust’s sketch of Northern Africa, Tacitus’ of Jewish history are of this sort—and, far superior to either, Cæsar’s account of Gaul and Britain.

The Germania[1] of Tacitus is the nearest approach to proper ethnology that antiquity has supplied. It is far, however, from either giving us the facts which are of the most importance, or exhibiting the method of investigation by which ethnology is most especially contrasted with history.

But the true measure of the carelessness of the Romans upon these points is to be taken by the same rule which applied to that of the Greeks; i. e. the contrast between their opportunities and their inquiry. Northern Italy, the Tyrol, Dalmatia, Pannonia, have all stood undescribed in respect to the ancient populations; yet they were all in a favourable position for description.

If the Jewish, Greek, and Roman writers give but little, the literatures derived from them give less; though, of course, there is a numerous selection of important passages to be made from the authors of the Middle Ages, as well as from the Byzantine historians. Besides which, there is the additional advantage of Greece and Rome having ceased to be the only countries thought worthy of being written about. A Gothic, a Slavonic, a Moorish history now make their appearance. Still they are but civil—not natural—histories. However, our sphere of observation increases, the members of the human family increase, and our records increase. Nevertheless, the facts for the naturalist occur but incidentally.

Of the Oriental literature I can only give my impression; and, as far as that goes, it is in favour of the Chinese statements having the most, and the Indian the least ethnological value; indeed, the former nation appears to have connected the notice of the occupant population with the notice of the area occupied, with laudable and sufficient closeness. I believe, too, that several differences of language are also carefully noted. Still, such ethnology as this supplies is an educt from the works in question, rather than their subject.

We now come to times nearer our own. For a sketch like the present, the Science begins when the classification of the Human Varieties is first attempted. Meanwhile, we must remember that America has been discovered, and that our opportunities now differ from those of the ancients not merely in degree but in kind. The field has been infinitely enlarged; and the world has become known in its extremities as well as in its middle parts. The human naturalists anterior to the times of Buffon and Linnæus are like the great men before Agamemnon. A minute literary history would doubtless put forward some names for this period; indeed for some departments of the study there are a few great ones. Still it begins with the times of Linnæus and Buffon—Buffon first in merit. That writer held that a General History of Man, as well as A Theory of the Earth, was a necessary part of his great work; and, as far as the former subject is concerned, he thought rightly. It is this, too, in which he has succeeded best. Thoroughly appreciating its importance, he saw its divisions clearly; and after eight chapters on the Growth of Man, his Decay, and his Senses, he devotes a ninth, as long as the others put together, to the consideration of the Varieties of the Human Species. “Every thing,” he now writes, “which we have hitherto advanced relates to Man as an individual. The history of the species requires a separate detail, of which the principal facts can only be derived from the varieties that are found in the inhabitants of different regions. Of these varieties, the first and most remarkable is the colour, the second the form and size, and the third the disposition. Considered in its full extent, each of these objects might afford materials for a volume