R. G. Latham

“ Every stranger, at this day, observes the great difference and complexion between the Highlanders and Lowlanders. No intelligent person in England is in danger of confounding the Welsh with the posterity of the Saxons. Now, if the Lowland Scots be not a Gothic race, but in fact the descendants of the ancient British, they must be supposed to retain some national resemblance of the Welsh. But will any impartial observer venture to assert, that in feature, complexion, or form, there is any such similarity as to induce the slightest apprehension that they have been originally the same people? ”

“ What if different modes of architecture, or sculpture, or varieties in the practice of such useful arts as weaving and ship-building, be attributed to the same principle that makes a sparrow’s nest different from a hawk’s, or a honey-bee’s from a hornet’s? What if there be different instincts in human art, as there is in the nidification of birds? Whatever may be the fact, it is clear that such a doctrine must modify the interpretation of it. ”

“ Who so fit to be good Catholics as the favoured of the Pope, the authorized converters of the heathen Indians, and the people whose national life was a crusade against the Mahometan on their own soil? Who, too, so born to the pride of purity of blood? There is much to account for all this, with which descent has nothing to do, although, perhaps, there is more than the explanation of all this accounts for.
A ballad literature, rising to the level of the humbler epics, and a truly home-grown drama, are the self-evolved, indigenous elements of Spanish literature. ”

“ I fear that there is almost a necessity. As long as men believed that the ordinary Latin and Greek grammars were good things of themselves, and that, even if they did not carry the student far into the classics, they told him something of value respecting language in general, a little learning in the dead languages was a good thing. But what if the grammars are not good things? What if they are absolutely bad? In such a case, the classical tongues cease to be learnt except for themselves. Now, one of the few things that is more useless than a little Latin is a little Greek. ”

“ With the Negro, we should search amongst old travellers and modern missionaries for such exact statements as we might be fortunate enough to find respecting his geographical position, the texture of his hair, the shade of his skin, the peculiarities of his creed, the structure of his language; and well satisfied should we be if anything at once new and true fell in our way. ”

“ If the simple excellence of a book were a sufficient reason for making it the only one belonging to the sciences which it professed to illustrate, few writers would be desirous of attempting a systematic work upon the Natural History of their species, after the admirable Physical History of Mankind, by the late and lamented Dr. Prichard,—a work which even those who are most willing to defer to the supposed superior attainments of Continental scholars, are not afraid to place on an unapproached eminence in respect to both our own and other countries. ”

“ Before we can consider the classification of these four families—Ugrian, Kelt, Gothic, and Græco-Latin—some fresh observations and certain new facts are requisite.
The ethnology of Europe is undoubtedly more difficult than that of any of the three other quarters of the globe—perhaps more so than that of all the world besides. It has not the character of being so—but so it is. The more we know the more we may know. Illustrated as is Europe by the historian and the antiquarian, it has its dark holes and corners made all the more visible from the illumination. ”

“ How far is the introduction of metal implements and of new arts, a sign of the introduction of a fresh stock or variety of the human species? How far, too, is the difference in the capacity of the skulls? How far the fact of the two changes coinciding? The answer has generally been in the affirmative. The men who used implements of bronze were Kelts; the men who eked out their existence with nothing better than adzes and arrow-heads of stone, were other than Keltic. They were ante-Keltic aborigines, whom a Keltic migration annihilated and superseded. Such is the widely-spread doctrine. ”

“ The prospect is so glorious that it seems an ungrateful task to interrupt its enjoyment by a shade of doubt: but as the English language has attained to this eminent station from small beginnings, may it not be advisable to consider whether obstacles are not in existence, which, equally small in their beginnings, have a probability of growing larger? The first consideration that presents itself is that English is not the only language firmly planted on the soil of America, the only one to which a glorious future is, in the probable course of things, assured. ”

“ Now our own language (the Anglo Saxon being borne in mind) comes under the conditions that constitute a good and sufficient language as a disciplinal foundation in Etymology. It can be studied in two stages. When we come to the Times of the Conquest we must gird up our loins for the acquisition of a new Language.
The Breaking-up of the Latin (I speak for the sake of illustration and comparison) is a study in itself. It is a study complete and sufficient; not, however, more so than is the study of the Breaking-up of the Gothic. ”

“ I am prepared to admit without much criticism, the statements of travellers as to the possession, on the part of the Chinese, of several of the most important arts and discoveries belonging to the civilization of Europe—of the art of printing, of paper-money, of a certain amount of astronomical knowledge, of the mariner's compass, and even of gunpowder. There is no reason why the Chinese, when once civilized, should not have worked out an average amount of discovery in the way of detail. The point upon which I doubt is the antiquity of that civilization, and still more the self-evolution of it ”

“ It by no means follows, that because there is an anthropology there is an ethnology also. There is no ethnology where there is but a single pair to the species. There would be no ethnology if all the world were negroes; none if every man was a Chinese; none if there were naught but Englishmen. The absolute catholicity of a religion without sects, the centralized uniformity of a universal empire, are types and parallels to an anthropology without an ethnology. This is because Ethnology deals with Man in respect to his Varieties. ”

“ Proud to be useful—scorning to be more
—must be the motto of him whose integrity should be on a level with his skill, who should win a double confidence, and who, if he do his duty well, is as sure of his proper influence in society, and on society—and that influence a noble one—as if he were the member of a profession ensured to respectability by all the favours that influence can extort, and all the prerogatives that time can accumulate. As compared with that of the church and bar, our hold upon the public is by a thread—but it is the thread of life. ”

“ Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. ”

“ Even if we knew the original power and derivation of every form of every pronoun in a language, it would be far from an easy matter to determine therefrom the paradigm that they should take in grammar. To place a word according to its power in a late stage of language might confuse the study of an early stage. To say that because a word was once in a given class, it should always be so, would be to deny that in the present English they, these, and she are personal pronouns at all. ”

“ In other words, every writer will be thought logical until there are reasons for suspecting the contrary. For a true and genuine tradition, however, I have so long sought in vain, that I despair of ever finding one. If found, it would be duly appreciated. On the other hand, by treating their counterfeits as inferences, we improve our position as investigators. A fact we must take as it is told us, and take it without any opportunity of correction—all or none; whereas, an inference can be scrutinized and amended. ”

“ When we consider these artfully and laboriously contrived languages, which, though existing at points separated from each other by so many hundreds of miles, have assumed a character not less remarkably similar among themselves than different from the principles of all other languages, it is certainly the most natural conclusion that these common methods of construction have their origin from a single point; that there has been one general source from which the culture of languages in America has been diffused, and which has been the common centre of its diversified idioms. ”

“ Lest any one undervalue the displacement, let him look at Asia Minor, which is now Turk, which has been Roman, Persian and Greek, and which has no single unequivocal remnant of its original population throughout its whole length and breadth. Yet, great as this is, it is no more than what we expect à priori. What families are and have been more encroaching than the populations hereabouts—Turks from the north, Arabs from the south, and Persians from the east? ”

“ Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement, which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more. ”

“ A true account of a real event transmitted from father to son in no set form of words, but told in a way that a nursery tale is told to children, or the way in which a piece of evidence is given in a court of justice, constitutes a tradition; for in this form only is it liable to those elements of uncertainty which distinguish tradition from history—elements which we must recognize, if we wish to be precise in our language. ”

“ Inferences fare worse. They are hardly allowed at all. It is all "theory and hypothesis" if we resort to them in cases from west to east; but it is no "theory" and no "hypothesis" when we follow the sun and move westwards.
Let the two lines be put on a level, and let ethnographical philology cease to be so one-sided as it is. Let the possibility of a Western origin of the Sanskrit language take its natural place as the member of an alternative hitherto ignored. ”

“ The Hungarian emigrants, who are now removing thither from the vengeance of Austria, may perpetuate their native Magyar, and America may in time present a surface as checkered as Europe, or in some parts, as Hungary itself, where the traveller often in passing from one village to another, finds himself in the domain of a different language. That this consummation may be averted must be the wish not only of every Englishman and of every Anglo-American, but of every sincere friend of the advancement of literature and civilization. ”

“ It is overrated when we make the affinities of speech between two populations absolute evidence of connection in the way of relationship. It is overrated when we talk of tongues being immutable, and of languages never dying. On the other hand, it is unduly disparaged when an inch [79] or two of difference in stature, a difference in the taste in the fine arts, a modification in the religious belief, or a disproportion in the influence upon the affairs of the world, is set up as a mark of distinction between two tribes speaking one and the same tongue, and alike in other matters. ”

“ It is at the bottom of the sea: forfeited, like the lava-stricken plains of Sicily, of Campania, and of Iceland, in the great game of Man against Nature—for it is not everywhere that Man has been the winner. The war of the Frisians against the sea has been the war not of the Titans against Jove, but of the Amphibii against Neptune.
Every Frisian—Friese as he calls himself—is an agriculturist, and it is only in the villages that the Frisian tongue is spoken. In the towns of Ripe, Bredsted, and Husum, small as they are, there is nothing but Danish and German. ”

“ Writers, speakers, journalists, and orators, Ribbonmen and Orangemen, who neither know nor care much about the Natural History of Man, talk about the Keltic stock, or the Keltic race, with a boldness and fluency that, except in the case of the antagonist term Anglo-Saxon, we meet with nowhere else. To read some of the dissertations on Irish misgovernment, or Welsh dissent, one might fancy that an American of Pennsylvania was writing about the aboriginal Indians, or the enslaved negroes—so much is there made of race, and so familiar are even the non-ethnological part of the world with the term. ”

“ I am quite satisfied that as far as the merits or demerits of an education contribute to the position of a profession, we may take ours as we find it, and yet hold our own. Nevertheless, lest the position given to medicine by its pre-eminent prominence, in conjunction with the church and bar, as one of the so-called learned professions, should encourage the idea that a multiplicity of accomplishments should be the character of a full and perfect medical practitioner, one or two important realities in respect to our position should be indicated. ”

“ Those of them who are only masters of one language are in a sort of prison; those who are masters of two, might, if English had been their original speech, have had their choice of the remaining languages of the world to exert the same degree of labour on, with a better prospect of advantage. In the case of Welsh, the language has many ties: even those who see most clearly the necessity of forsaking it, must lament the harsh necessity of abandoning to oblivion the ancient tongue of an ancient nation. ”

“ The Dokos live mixed together; men and women unite and separate as they please; and this Dilbo considers as the reason why the tribe has not been exterminated, though frequently a single slave-dealer returns home with a thousand of them reduced to slavery. The mother suckles the child only as long as she is unable to find ants and snakes for its food: she abandons it as soon as it can get its food by itself. No rank or order exists among the Dokos. Nobody orders, nobody obeys, nobody defends the country, nobody cares for the welfare of the nation. ”

“ Grammar, as a art, is, undoubtedly, the art of speaking and writing correctly—but then, as an art, it is only required for foreign languages. For our own we have the necessary practice and familiarity.
The true claim of English grammar to form part and parcel of an English education stands or falls with the value of the philological knowledge to which grammatical studies may serve as an introduction, and with the value of scientific grammar as a disciplinal study. ”

“ As if the Frisian of Friesland, the Frisian of the south, had not been the language of law and poetry for more than eight [179] hundred years, and, as if it were a bit harder to write, or print, the northern dialect of the same, than it was for Scotland to have a literature. For the tongue is no growth of yesterday. It may, possibly, be as much older as any other tongue of the Peninsula as the Welsh is older than the English. That it is older than some of them is certain. Amateur investigators of it there are, of course. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But though all these are termed dialects of the Greek, it does not follow that there was ever a Greek language of which these were variations, and which had any being apart from these. Dialects then are essentially languages: and the name dialect itself is but a convenient grammarian's phrase, invented as part of the machinery by which to carry on reasonings respecting languages. We learn the language which has the best and largest literature extant; and having done so, we treat all very nearly resembling languages as variations from what we have learnt. ”

“ Such is medical education as an instrument of self-culture: and as education stands at present, a man who has made the most of them may walk among the learned men of the world with a bold and confiding front. ”

“ Ask it of one of our English anatomists. His answer is as follows:—“Let us attend now to the greatest of all experiments ever made in respect of the transfer of a population indigenous to one continent, and attempting by emigration to take possession of another; to cultivate it with their own hands; to colonize it; to persuade the world, in time, that they are the natives of the newly occupied land. Northern America and Australia furnished the fields of this, the greatest of experiments. Already has the horse, the sheep, the ox, become as it were indigenous to these lands. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon, in the spirit and analogy of his whole language, could have used words which had never been heard before, and been at once understood: if we would introduce a new name for a new thing, we must take refuge in the courtesy of our neighbours, and borrow from the French, or Greek, or Latin, terms which never cease to betray their foreign origin, by never putting off the forms of the tongue from which they were taken, or assuming those of the tongue into which they are adopted. The English language is a dead one. ”

“ We draw too much upon the Philologists of Germany; and where men draw indefinitely they trust implicitly. I believe that the foundations of Etymology are to be laid upon the study of existing processes; and I grow sanguine when I remember that by no one so well as by an Englishman can these processes be collected. With the exception of the Russian (a doubtful exception) we come in contact with more Languages than any nation under the Sun. Here then we have an advantage in externals. The details of Etymology I can willingly give up to the scholars of the Continent ”

“ Man’s Civil history has its divisions. Man’s Natural history has them also.
The first of these takes its name from the Greek words for man (anthrôpos) and doctrine (logos) , and is known as Anthropology.
When the first pair of human beings stood alone on the face of the earth, there were then the materials for Anthropology; and so there would be if our species were reduced to the last man. There would be an Anthropology if the world had [5] no inhabitants but Englishmen, or none but Chinese; none but red men of America, or none but blacks of Africa. ”

“ That the men of the North should acquire an easy and harmonious southern language seems in itself much more probable than that the men of the south should study a northern language, not only rugged in its pronunciation, but capricious in its orthography. The dominion of Spanish in America is, however, interrupted and narrowed by that of Portuguese, and to a singular degree by that of the native languages, some of which are possibly destined to be used for literary purposes in ages to come. ”

“ The civil historian, therefore, of our species, or, to speak with a conciseness which common parlance allows, [3] the historian, living and breathing in the peculiar atmosphere of humanity, and exhibiting man in the wide circle of moral and intellectual action,—a circle in which none but he moves,—takes up his study where that of the lower animals ends. Whatever is common to them and man, belongs to the naturalist. Let each take his view of the Arab or the Jew. ”

“ It is more probable that an habitually conquering nation should have displaced an habitually conquered one, than that a bad writer should be wrong. It is more likely that a good writer should be wrong than that an habitually conquered nation should have displaced an habitually conquering one.
The application of criticism of this sort materially alters the relations of the Celtic, Gothic, Roman and Slavonic populations, giving to the latter a prominence in the ancient world much more proportionate to their present preponderance as a European population than is usually admitted. ”

“ At present the prospects of the English language are the most splendid that the world has ever seen. It is spreading in each of the quarters of the globe by fashion, by emigration, and by conquest. The increase of population alone in the two great states of Europe and America in which it is spoken, adds to the number of its speakers in every year that passes, a greater amount than the whole number of those who speak some of the literary languages of Europe, either Swedish, or Danish, or Dutch. ”

“ To carry such as hear me through a series of Authors, or through a course of Languages, in full detail, is evidently, even if it were desirable, an impossibility; but it is no impossibility to direct their attention to the prominent features of a particular subject, and to instil into them the imperious necessity of putting forth their own natural powers in an independent manner, so as to read for themselves, and to judge for themselves. ”