ethnology, the philological principle of classification, the philological test. The worst that can be said of this is that it was isolated. The philologists began work independently of the anatomists, and the anatomists independently of the philologists. And so, with one great exception, they have kept on.

Pigafetta, one of the circumnavigators with Magalhaens, was the first who collected specimens of the unlettered dialects of the countries that afforded opportunities.

The Abbé Hervas in the 17th century, published his Catalogue of Tongues, and Arithmetic of Nations, parts of a large and remarkable work, the Saggio del Universo. His data he collected by means of an almost unlimited correspondence with the Jesuit missionaries of the Propaganda.

The all-embracing mind of Leibnitz had not only applied itself to philology, but had clearly seen its bearing upon history. A paper on the Basque language is a sample of the ethnology of the inventor of Fluxions.

Reland wrote on the wide distribution of the Malay tongue; criticised certain vocabularies from the South-Sea Islands of Hoorn, Egmont, Ticopia (then called Cocos Island), and Solomon’s Archipelago, and gave publicity to a fact which even now is mysterious—the existence of Malay words in the language of Madagascar.

In 1801 Adelung’s Mithridates appeared, containing specimens of all the known languages of the world; a work as classical to the comparative philologist as Blackstone’s Commentaries are to the English lawyer. Vater’s Supplement (1821) is a supplement to Adelung; Jülg’s (1845) to Vater’s.

Klaproth’s is the other great classic in this department. His Asia Polyglotta and Sprachatlas give us the classification of all the families of Asia, according to the vocabularies representing their languages. Whether a comparison between their different grammars would do the same is doubtful; since it by no means follows that the evidence of the two coincides.

Klaproth and Adelung have the same prominence in philological that Buffon and Blumenbach have in zoological ethnology.

Blumenbach appreciated the philological method: but the first who combined the two was Dr. Prichard. His profession gave him the necessary physiology; and that he was a philologist amongst philologists is shown not only by numerous details scattered throughout his writings, but by his ‘Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations’—the most definite and desiderated addition that has been made to ethnographical philology. I say nothing about the details of Dr. Prichard’s great work. Let those who doubt its value try to do without it.

But there is still something wanting. The relation of the sciences to the other branches of knowledge requires fixing. With anthropology the case is pretty clear. It comes into partial contact with the naturalist sciences (or those based on the principle of classification) and the biological (or those based on the idea of organization and life).

Ethnology, however, is more undecided in respect to position. If it be but a form of history, its place amongst the inductive sciences is equivocal; since neither the laws which it developes nor the method of pursuing it give it a place here. These put it in the same category with a series of records taken from the testimony of witnesses, or with a book of travels—literary but not scientific. And so it really is to a certain extent. Two remarkable productions, however, have determined its relations to be otherwise.

In Sir C. Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ we have an elaborate specimen of reasoning from the known to the unknown, and of the inference of causes from effects. It would have been discreditable to our philosophy if such a sample of logic put in practice had been disregarded.

Soon after, came forth the pre-eminently suggestive works, par nobile, of the present Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Here we are taught that in the sciences of geology, ethnology, and archæology, the method determines the character of the study; and that in all these we argue backwards. Present effects we know; we also know their causes as far as the historical period goes back. When we get beyond this, we can still reason—reason from the experience that the historical period has supplied. Climate, for instance, and certain other conditions have some effect; within the limits of generation a small, within that of a millenium a larger one. Hence, before we dismiss a difference as inexplicable, we must investigate the changes that may have produced it, the conditions which may have determined those changes, and the time required from the exhibition of their influence.

In Dr. Prichard’s ‘Anniversary Address,’ delivered before the Ethnological Society of London in 1847—a work published after the death of its illustrious author—this relationship to Geology is emphatically recognized:—“Geology, as every one knows, is not an account of what nature produces in the present day, but of what it has long ago produced. It is an investigation of the changes which the surface of our planet has undergone in ages long since past. The facts on which the inferences of geology are founded, are collected from various parts of Natural History. The student of geology inquires into the processes of nature which are at present going on, but this is for the purpose of applying the knowledge so acquired to an investigation of what happened in past times, and of tracing, in the different layers of the earth’s crust—displaying, as they do, relics of various forms of organic life—the series of the repeated creations which have taken place. This investigation evidently belongs to History or Archæology, rather than to what is termed Natural History. By a learned writer, whose name will ever be connected with the annals of the British Association, the term Palæontology has been aptly applied to sciences of this department, for which Physical Archæology may be used as a synonym. Palæontology includes both Geology and Ethnology. Geology is the archæology of the globe—ethnology that of its human inhabitants.”

When ethnology loses its palæontological character, it loses half its scientific elements; and the practical and decided recognition of this should be the characteristic of the English school of ethnologists.

This chapter will conclude with the notice of the bearings of the palæontological method upon one of the most difficult parts of ethnology, viz. the identification of ancient populations, or the distribution of the nations mentioned by the classical, scriptural and older oriental writers amongst the existing or extinct stocks and families of mankind.

There are the Etruscans—who were they? The Pelasgians—who were they? The Huns that overrun Europe in the fifth century; the Cimmerii that devastated Asia, 900 years earlier? Archæology answers some of these questions; and the testimony of ancient writers helps us in others. Yet both mislead—perhaps, almost as often as they direct us rightly. If it were not so, there would be less discrepancy of opinion.

Nevertheless, up to the present time the primary fact concerning any such populations has always been the testimony of some ancient historian or geographer, and the first question that has been put is, What say Tacitus—Strabo—Herodotus—Ptolemy, &c. &c.? In critical hands the inquiries go further; and statements are compared, testimonies weighed in a balance