Edward Burnett Tylor

“ In all the principles of his internal structure, in the composition and functions of his parts, man is but an animal. The lord of the earth, who contemplates the eternal order of the universe, and aspires to communion with its invisible Maker, is a being composed of the same materials, and framed on the same principles, as the creatures which he has tamed to be the servile instruments of his will, or slays for his daily food. The points of resemblance are innumerable ”

“ In determining whether the races of mankind are to be classed as varieties of one species, it is important to decide whether every two races can unite to produce fertile offspring. It is settled by experience that the most numerous and well-known crossed races, such as the Mulattos, descended from Europeans and Negroes—the Mestizos, from Europeans and American indigenes—the Zambos, from these American indigenes and Negroes, &c., are permanently fertile. ”

“ For all that known dialects prove to the contrary, on the other hand, there may have been one primitive language, from which the descendant languages have varied so widely, that neither their words nor their formation now indicate their unity in long past ages, while, on the other hand, the primitive tongues of mankind may have been numerous, and the extreme uulikeness of such languages as Basque, Chinese, Peruvian, Hottentot, and Sanskrit, may arise from absolute independence of origin.
The language spoken by any tribe or nation is not of itself absolute evidence as to its race-affinities. ”

“ ANTHROPOLOGY (the science of man, ἄνθρωπος, λόγος) denotes the natural history of mankind. In the general classification of knowledge it stands as the highest section of zoology or the science of animals, itself the highest section of biology or the science of living beings. ”

“ No people civilised enough to preserve history could have watched the age-long process of a savage tribe developing its culture; indeed, experience shows that independent progress could hardly have taken place among an uncivilised in contact with a civilised race. ”

“ Nothing short of a similarity in the roots or elements of two languages, as well as in their grammatical structure, too strong to be explained by any independent causes, is now admitted as valid proof of common descent. This limitation, however, by no means amounts to a denial of the possibility of such descent. Thus it is often argued, on the strength of some similarities between Hebrew and Indo-European roots, that the two so distinct Semitic and Aryan families of language are themselves sprung from some yet more remotely ancient tongue. ”

“ The problem of ascertaining how the small number of races, distinct enough to be called primary, can have assumed their different types, has been for years the most disputed field of anthropology, the battle-ground of the rival schools of monogenists and polygenists. The one has claimed all mankind to be descended from one original stock, and generally from a single pair; the other has contended for the several primary races being separate species of independent origin. ”

“ Among such are the immense legal development by which the primitive law of personal vengeance passed gradually away, leaving but a few surviving relics in the modern civilised world, and being replaced by the higher doctrine that crime is an offence against society, to be repressed for the public good. Another vast social change has been that from the patriarchal condition, in which the unit is the family under the despotic rule of its head, to the systems in which individuals make up a society whose government is centralised in a chief or king. ”

“ In fact it is not so, for every division of mankind presents in every character wide deviations from a standard. Thus the Negro race, well marked as it may seem at the first glance, proves on closer examination to include several shades of complexion and features, in some districts varying far from the accepted Negro type ; while the examination of a series of native American tribes shows that, notwithstanding their asserted uniformity of type, they differ in stature, colour, features, and proportions of skull. ”

“ The opinion is deeply rooted in modern as in ancient thought, that only a distinctively human element of the highest import can account for the severance between man and the highest animal below him. Differences in the mechanical organs, such as the perfection of the human hand as an instrument, or the adaptability of the human voice to the expression of human thought, are indeed of great value. ”

“ No doubt the phenomena of intellect appear in vastly higher and more complete organisation in man than in beings below him in the scale of nature, that beasts and birds only attain to language in its lower rudiments, and that only the germs of moral tendency and social law are discernible among the lower animals. ”

“ In most or all nations of mankind, crossing or intermarriage of races has thus taken place between the conquering invader and the conquered native, so that the language spoken by the nation may represent the residts of conquest as much or more than of ancestry. The supersession of the Keltic Cornish by English, and of the Slavonic Old-Prussian by German, are but examples of a process which has for un told ages been supplanting native dialects, whose very names have mostly disappeared. ”

“ As regards political nationality and the history of civilisation, the evidence of speech is of still greater weight. In many cases of the mixture of nations the language of the dominant civilisation prevails, as where Latin dialects superseded the native tongues in Western Europe, and Germanic languages encroached on Turanian in Finland, on Slavonic in Russia, and on Keltic in the Scotch High lands. In other cases, where one nation has received elements of civilisation from another, language is apt to keep record of the process by adopting foreign words and ideas together. ”

“ Whether from a popular or a scientific point of view, it would be admitted that a Negro, a Chinese, and an Australian, belong to three such permanent varieties of men, all plainly distinguishable from one another and from any European. Moreover, such a division takes for granted the idea which is involved in the word race, that each of these varieties is due to special ancestry, each race thus representing an ancient breed or stock, however these breeds or stocks may have had their origin. ”

“ Under the present standard of evidence in comparing languages and tracing allied groups to a common origin, the crude speculations as to a single primeval language of mankind, which formerly occupied so much attention, are acknowledged to be worthless. ”

“ An examination of the details of savage life shows not only that there is an immeasurable difference between the rudest man and the highest lower animal, but also that the least cultured savages have themselves advanced far beyond the lowest intellectual and moral state at which human tribes can be conceived as capable of existing, when placed under favourable circumstances of warm climate, abundant food, and security from too severe destructive influences. ”

“ Thus the language of any people, though less effective than was once believed as a means of determining its place in the classified order of mankind, does, to some extent; indicate its physical, and, to a still greater extent, its intellectual ancestry.
VI. Development of Civilisation.—The conditions of man at the lowest and highest known levels of culture are separated by a vast interval; but this interval is so nearly filled by known intermediate stages, that the line of continuity between the lowest savagery and the highest civilisation is unbroken at any critical point. ”

“ In the evolution of science the new knowledge ever starts from the old, whether its results be to improve, to shift, or to supersede it. The history of astronomy extends far enough back to show its barbaric stages, when the earth was regarded as a flat surface, over-arched by a solid dome or firmament ”

“ Thus each linguistic family affords at least partial evidence of race, proving, for instance, the existence of a common ancestry of the Irishman and the Russian, of the Jew and the Maltese, of the Tahitian and the Malagasy, though in such pairs of races the actual amount of common ancestry may be less than that of the different race-elements with which it has combined. ”

“ Mr Darwin's summing up of the evidence as to unity of type throughout the races of mankind is as distinctly a monogenist argument as those of Blumenbach, Prichard, or Quatrefages—
“Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as iu colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet, if their whole organisation he taken into consideration, they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. ”

“ In the growth of systematic civilisation, the art of writing has had an influence so intense, that of all tests to distinguish the barbaric from the civilised state, none is so generally effective as this, whether they have but the failing link with the past which mere memory furnishes, or can have recourse to written records of past history and written constitutions of present order. ”

“ To ascertain the causes to which languages owe their unlikeness in material and structure, how far to essential differences of mental type among the races of mankind, and how far to minor causes of variation, which may be called secondary, is a problem of extreme difficulty, towards the precise solution of which little has yet been done. ”

“ Mr Wallace's view is substantially that the remotely ancient representatives of the human species, being as yet animals too low in mind to have developed those arts of maintenance and social ordinances by which man holds his own against influences from climate and circumstance, were in their then wild state much more plastic than now to external nature ; so that “natural selection” and other causes met with but feeble resistance in forming the permanent varieties or races of man, whose complexion and structure still remain fixed in their descendants. ”

“ This is true in the extreme case of the West Indian coloured population, among whom the majority are now crossed with European blood, so that in each succeeding generation the proportion of absolutely pure Negro families becomes less. Still more fully is it true of coloured races in Mexico or Brazil, whose Spanish or Portuguese language represents at least a large European element of ancestry. Thus in India many millions of people, whose blood is predominantly that of the darker indigenous race, never theless speak dialects of the languages of the fairer Aryans ”

“ This geological claim for a vast antiquity of the human race is supported by the similar claims of prehistoric archaeology and the science of culture, the evidence of all three departments of inquiry being intimately connected, and in perfect harmony.
During the last half century, the fact has been established that human bones and objects of human manufacture occur in such geological relation to the remains of fossil species of elephant, rhinoceros, hysena, bear, &c., as to lead to the distinct inference that man already existed during the ancient period of these now extinct mammalia. ”

“ It need hardly be said that this method of deter mining the mean type of a race, as being that of its really existing and most numerous class, is altogether superior to the mere calculation of an average, which may actually be represented by comparatively few individuals, and those the exceptional ones. For instance, the average stature of the mixed European and Chinese population just referred to might be 5 ft. ”

“ The anthropological classification of mankind is thus zoological in its nature, like that of the varieties or species of any other animal group, and the characters on which it is based are in great measure physical, though intellectual and traditional peculiarities, such as moral habit and language, furnish important aid. Among the best-marked race-characters are the following:—
The colour of the skin has always been held as specially distinctive. ”

“ The measurement and description of the various races of men are now carried to great minuteness (the tables in Schcrzcr and Schwarz, Reise der Novara, and those of Fritsch, Die Eingeborenen Sud-Afrika's, 1872, may be cited as examples of modern method) , so that race-classification is rapidly improving as to both scope and accuracy. Even where comparatively loose observations have been made, it is possible, by inspection of considerable numbers of indi viduals, to define the prevalent type of a race with tolerable approximation to the real mean or standard man. ”

“ Thus, if the existence of a small number of distinct races of mankind be taken as a starting-point, it is obvious that their crossing would produce an indefinite number of secondary varieties, such as the population of the world actually presents. ”

“ The adoption by one language of words originally belong ing to another, proving as it does the fact of intercourse between two races, and even to some extent indicating the results of such intercourse, affords a valuable clue through obscure regions of the history of civilisation.
Communication by gesture-signs, between persons unable to converse in vocal language, is an effective system of expression common to all mankind. ”

“ But, beyond a doubt, man possesses, and in some way possesses by -virtue of his superior brain, a power of co ordinating the impressions of his senses, which enables him to understand the world he lives in, and by understanding to use, resist, and even in a measure rule it. No human art shows the nature of this human attribute more clearly than does language. ”

“ Falling back or decay also takes place, but only to a limited extent destroys the results of growth in culture. It is thus matter of actual record, that the ancestors of civilised nations were barbaric tribes, and the inference seems reasonable that the same process of development had gone on during previous ages outside the domain of direct history, so that barbaric culture itself arose out of an earlier and ruder condition of primitive culture, more or less corresponding with the state of modern savage tribes. ”

“ Although the three divisions of savage, barbaric, and civilised man do not correspond at all perfectly Adth the stone, bronze, and iron ages, the classification of civilisation thus introduced by Nilsson and Thomsen has proved a guide of extraordinary value in arranging in their proper order of culture the nations of the Old World. ”

“ Philology is especially appealed to by anthropologists as contributing to the following lines of argument. A primary mental similarity of all branches of the human race is evidenced by their common faculty of speech, while at the same time secondary diversities of race-character and history are marked by difference of grammatical structure and of vocabularies. The exist ence of groups or families of allied languages, each group being evidently descended from a single language, affords one of the principal aids in classifying nations and races. ”