R. G. Latham

“ They apply to these—and they apply to man as well. They—and the like of them—Legion by name—common alike to the lords and the lower orders of the creation, constitute the natural history of genus Homo; and I use the language of the Zoologist for the sake of exhibiting in a prominent and palpable manner, the truly zoological character of this department of science. Man as an animal is the motto here; whilst Man as a moral being is the motto with the Historian. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ They tell us something—but not what we want to know: inasmuch as our question now concerns blood, descent, pedigree, relationship. To tell an inquirer [75] who wishes to deduce one population from another that certain distant tribes agree with the one under discussion in certain points of resemblance, is as irrelevant as to tell a lawyer in search of the next of kin to a client deceased, that though you know of no relations, you can find a man who is the very picture of him in person—a fact good enough in itself, but not to the purpose ”

“ During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in movement, and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high function of subduing the earth, are in conflict with physical obstacles, and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless—like Lot’s wife—he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men—at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words—during the primary migration—the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Colour, hair, skin, bone, stature—all [24] these are points of physical conformation or structure; material and anatomical; points which the callipers or the scalpel investigates. But colour, hair, skin, bone, and stature, are not the only characteristics of man; nor yet the only points wherein the members of his species differ from each other. There is the function as well as the organ; and the parts of our body must be considered in regard to what they do as well as with reference to what they are. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would be as impossible a science as a polity on Robinson Crusoe’s island.
But let there be but a single sample of different though similar bodily conformation. Let there be a [8] white as well as a black, or a black as well as a white man. In that case ethnology begins; even as a polity began on Crusoe’s island when his servant Friday became a denizen of it.
The other classes of organized beings, although, mutatis mutandis, they have, of necessity, their equivalent to an anthropology, may or may not have an ethnology. The dog has one; the chimpanzee has either none or an insignificant one ”

“ It is for Ethnology, then, that classification is most wanted—more than for Anthropology; even as it is for Zoology that we require orders and genera rather than for Physiology. This is based upon certain distinctive characters; some of which are of a physical, others of a moral sort. Each falls into divisions. There are moral and intellectual phænomena which prove nothing in the way of relationship, simply because they are the effects of a common grade of civilizational development. ”

“ But Britain is an island. Everything relating to the natural history of the useful arts is so wholly uninvestigated, that no one has proposed even to approximate the date of the first launch of the first boat; in other words, of the first occupancy of a piece of land surrounded by water. The whole of that particular continent in which the first protoplasts saw light, may have remained full to overflowing before a single frail raft had effected the first human migration. ”

“ Were the uniformity of feature, the identity of colour, the equality of stature, the rivalry of mental capacity ever so great, there would still be an Anthropology. This is because Anthropology deals with Man as compared with the lower animals. ”

“ What follows applies to Ethnology. The first result we get from our observations is a classification, i. e. groups of individuals, families, tribes, nations, sub-varieties, varieties, and (according to some) of species connected by some common link, and united on some common principle. There is no want of groups of this kind; and many of them [71] are so natural as to be unsusceptible of improvement. Yet the nomenclature for their different divisions is undetermined, the values of many of them uncertain, and, above all, the principle upon which they are formed is by no means uniform. ”

“ With the horse, or the sheep, with many of the domestic fowls, with the more widely-cultivated plants, the study of the variety outweighs that of the species. With the dog it does so in an unparalleled degree. But what if the dog-tribe had the use of language? [9] what if the language differed with each variety? In such a case the study of canine ethnology would be doubly and trebly complex, though at the same time the data for conducting it would be both increased and improved. A distant—a very distant approach—to this exists. The wild dog howls; the companion of man alone barks. ”

“ Hence the experience of the kind in question, valuable as it is in the way of Medical Police, is comparatively worthless in a theory as to the Migrations of Mankind. Take a man from Caucasus to the Gold Coast, and he either dies or takes a fever. But would he do so if his previous sojourn had been on the Gambia, his grandfather’s on the Senegal, his ancestor’s in the tenth degree on the Nile, and that ancestor’s ancestor’s on the Jordan—thus going back till we reached the first remote patriarch of the migration on the Phasis? ”

“ Great experiments in the transfer of populations from one climate to another have gone on ever since the discovery of America, and are going on now; sometimes westwards as to the New World; sometimes eastwards as to Australia and New Zealand; now from Celtic populations like Ireland; now from Gothic countries like England and Germany; now from Spain and Portugal;—to say nothing of the equally great phænomenon of Negro slavery being the real or supposed condition of American prosperity. ”

“ The Natchez, known to the novelist from the romance of Chateaubriand, are known to the ethnologist as pre-eminent amongst the Indians of the Mississippi for their Mexican characteristics. They flattened the head, worshiped the sun, kept up an undying fire, recognized a system of caste, and sacrificed human victims. Yet to identify them [121] with the Asteks, to assume even any extraordinary intercourse, would be unsafe. Their traditions, indeed, suggest the idea of a migration; but their language contradicts their traditions. They are simply what the other natives of Florida were. ”

“ If the lips thicken and the skin blackens, we think of the Negro; if the cheek-bones stand out and if the eye—as it sometimes does—become oblique, the Mongol comes into our thoughts.
The original Indian creeds are best characterized by negatives. They are neither Brahminic nor Buddhist.
The language, for the present, is best brought under the same description. No man living considers it to be Indo-European.
In proportion as any particular Indian population is characterized by these three marks, its origin, purity, and indigenous nature become clearer—and vice versâ. ”

“ In the first place, the very fact of its being the home of the great historical nations has made it the scene of unparalleled displacements; for conquest is the great staple of history, and conquest and displacement are correlative terms. A greater portion of Europe can be shown to be held by either mixed or conquering nations than is to be found elsewhere—not that this absolutely proves the encroachments [168] to have been greater; but that gives prominence to the greater degree in which they have been recorded. ”

“ Nothing is said about Cape Horn; as America in relation to Asia is an island. It is also, perhaps, unnecessary to repeat that both the rate and the centre are hypothetical—either or both may or may not be correct. That which is not hypothetical is the approximation to an equability of rate in the case of continents. It is difficult to conceive any such conditions, as those which deferred the occupancy of islands like Madagascar and Iceland, by emigrants from Africa or Greenland, for an indefinite period, keeping one part of Africa or Greenland empty whilst another was full. ”

“ Have they reached the island? In case they have done so, and kept body and soul together, New Siberia is probably the most northern spot of the inhabited world.
How cold a country must be in order to remain empty of men, we have seen. Such localities are but few. None are too hot—unless, indeed, we believe the centre of Equatorial Africa to be a solitude.
In South America there is a great blank in the Maps. For many degrees on each side of the Upper Amazons lies a vast tract—said to be a [91] jungle—and marked Sirionos, the name of a frontier population. ”

“ The Hottentot language contains a sound which I believe to be an in-aspirated h, i. e. a sound of h formed by drawing in the breath, rather than by forcing it out—as is done by the rest of the world. This is called the click. It is a truly inarticulate sound; and as the common h is found in the language as well, the Hottentot speech presents the remarkable phenomenon of two inarticulate sounds, or two sounds common to man and the lower animals. As a point of anthropology this may be of value: in ethnology it has probably been misinterpreted. ”

“ From its excessive amount of displacement, Europe is that part of the world where there are the best grounds for believing in the previous existence of absolutely extinct families, or rather in the absolute extinction of families previously existing. There are no names in Asia that raise so many problems as those of the European Pelasgi and Etrurians. ”

“ Yet the zone of population that encircles the inhospitable shores of the Polar Sea is not exclusively either Lap or Samoeid—nor yet Eskimo. In Europe, the Laplander finds a contrast on each side. There is the Norwegian on the west; the Finlander on the east. We can explain this. The former is but a recent occupant; not a natural, but an intruder. This we infer from the southern distribution of the other members of his family—who are Danish, German, Dutch, English, and American. For the same reason the Icelander differs from the Greenlander. ”