ART. IV.

1. Researches into the Physical History of Mankind. By JAMES COWLES PRICHARD, M.D., F.R.S., M.R.I.A., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, &c. &c. Third edition.-London, 1836-47. Five volumes, 8vo, pp. 2547. With numerous Plates.

2. The Natural History of Man; comprising Inquiries into the Modifying Influence of Physical and Moral Agencies on the different Tribes of the Human Family. By JAMES COWLES PRICHARD, M.D., F.R.S., M.R.I.A., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, &c. &c.London, 1843. 8vo, pp. 556. With forty Plates and ninety WoodEngravings.

3. Appendix to the First Edition of the Natural History of Man.London, 1845. 8vo, pp. 40. With six coloured Plates.

If a person, whose knowledge of Mankind is restricted to the individuals of his own nation, and who is consequently unaware of the diversities in complexion, conformation, and habits, which exist among the several races of men, could suddenly be made a spectator of the various conditions which they assume in different parts of the earth, we cannot doubt that his curiosity would be strongly excited, as to the degree of relationship to himself which these races possess.

"If such a person," as Dr. Prichard has well remarked, "after surveying some brilliant ceremony or court-pageant in one of the splendid cities of Europe, were suddenly carried into a hamlet in Negroland, at the hour when the sable tribes recreate themselves with dancing and barbarous music; or if he were transported into the saline plains, over which bald and tawny Mongolians roam, differing but little in hue from the yellow soil of their steppes, brightened by the saffron flowers of the iris or the tulip;- —or if he were placed near the solitary dens of the Bushmen, where the lean and hungry savage crouches in silence, like a beast of prey, watching with fixed eyes the birds which enter his pit-fall, or the insects and reptiles which chance may bring within his grasp;—or if he were carried into the midst of an Australian forest, where the squalid companions of kangaroos may be seen crawling in procession, in imitation of quadrupeds ;would the spectator of such phenomena imagine the different groups which he had surveyed to be the offspring of one family? and if he were led to adopt that opinion, how would he attempt to account for the striking diversities in their aspect and manner of existence?"

This question is capable of being considered under a great variety of aspects. There are many very excellent persons, who think it quite sufficiently answered by the authority of the scriptural narrative; and if we make up our minds to receive with implicit confidence the declarations of the Bible in regard to the common origin of all the races of mankind, the question might seem to be decided without the necessity of entering upon any further inquiry. But it is not so in reality. There is a large class of persons at the present time, especially on the other side of the Atlantic, who profess the highest veneration for the Scriptures, and who would look with horror at any attempts to impugn their authority on any subjects regarding which their own prejudices and supposed interests lie in conformity with their teachings: and yet these very persons, to serve their own purposes, get rid of the historical testimony and the various declarations contained

XLVII.-XXIV.

in the Bible, in favour of the Unity of Origin of the Human Races,—after the following fashion. They maintain that the Adamic race does not include the uncivilized inhabitants of remote regions; and that Negroes, for example, Hottentots, Esquimaux, and Australians, are not in fact men in the full sense of the term, or beings endowed with mental faculties similar to our own. By writers of this school it is contended that these and other barbarous tribes are inferior in their original endowments to the proper human family which supplied Europe and Asia with inhabitants; and that, being organically different, they are separated by an "impassable barrier" from the race which displays in the highest degree all the attributes of humanity, and can never be raised to an equality with it. They maintain that the ultimate lot of the ruder tribes is a state of perpetual servitude; and that if, in some instances, they should continue to repel the attempts of the civilized nations to subdue them, they will at length be rooted out and exterminated from every country on the shores of which Europeans shall have set their feet. If the distinct origin of these tribes. be admitted, if we are to regard the Negro and the Australian, not as our fellow-men, brethren of the same great family with ourselves, but as beings of an inferior order,-and if duties towards them were not contemplated, as we may in that case presume them not to have been, in any of the positive commands on which the morality of the christian world is founded, our relations to those tribes will appear not to be very different from those which we might consider ourselves to hold towards the higher races of brutes. We can scarcely imagine a Grotius, or a Puffendorf, or any other great jurist, attempting to determine the jus belli or pacis between ourselves and a tribe of Orangs, who had just sense enough to pass for men and began to be suspected of the cheat;-which is nearly the true character of the Negroes, if those are right who maintain the doctrines to which we have alluded. And we may go a step farther and assert, that there is in such a case no moral principle which should prevent a hungry wanderer in Negroland or Australia from satisfying his appetite by killing and eating the first native he might happen to meet.

Thus, then, we see that the widest extremes of opinion, and the greatest diversities in those rules of conduct which are founded upon those opinions, may exist among those who profess the most implicit reverence for the Scriptural dictum, that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth;" for whilst some include under the term men all the individuals grouped together by the naturalist under the genus Homo, others assert that this genus includes several speeies, which form a gradation between the highest and most cultivated races of mankind, and those degraded tribes which seem to have more in common with the brutes; the former alone being really entitled to the appellation Men, whilst the latter should be designated by some other name indicative of their close affinity to Chimpanzees and Orangs.

But the question may be discussed without any reference to the supposed authority of the Scriptures on this head; and this, not merely by those who reject revelation altogether, but by those who consider the Bible as imparting truths of its own relating to the moral not the physical history of mankind, for which they entertain the highest veneration; and as not intended to enlighten us upon the present question, any more than upon astronomy or geology. The origin of mankind from a single stock,

or from a diversity of stocks, thus becomes a matter of purely scientific investigation; and as such we shall treat it,-not with an entire indifference as to its issue, for we consider it a matter of no trifling importance to arrive at a correct result,-but, we venture to affirm, with an earnest desire to arrive at the truth, wherever this may be to be found.

The question may be thus stated. In the first place, all the existing races of mankind may be supposed to be the offspring of one pair; and it becomes necessary then to account for the diversities which they now present, in physical conformation, in language, and in mental character and social condition. Secondly, the existing races may be supposed to have descended from several distinct pairs, which originally presented differences amongst themselves, nearly the same with those which now exist amongst the races that seem most remotely related to each other. The first of these suppositions requires that evidence should be given of a very considerable amount of variability from the original type-whatever that may have been-amongst the descendants from the common ancestry. The second is based upon the idea that the leading characters which now separate the different races are permanent, and must have been presented by their original progenitors. A third supposition is perhaps admissible; namely, that the existing races did not all proceed from one stock, but from several; but that these, although scattered over the globe, differed only in the adaptation of certain of their physical characters to the different circumstances of their several abodes, being all possessed of the same essential nature, both mental and corporeal, and all having a certain capacity for variation, so that the prolonged influence of climate, civilization, &c., might in a great degree obliterate the original differences. The moral relations between the several races would, on this last supposition, be as close as on the first, although the same physical affinity or bloodrelationship would not exist. We cannot but agree with a recent reviewer of Dr. Prichard's work, in the remark that "the moral rights of men depend on their moral nature; while Africans have the hearts and consciences of human beings, it could never be right to treat them as domestic cattle or as wild fowl, if it were ever so abundantly demonstrated that their race was but an improved species of ape, and ours a degenerate kind of god."* It is in adopting the second supposition that those find their ground of defence, who assert that they are justified in treating as brute beasts certain races which have the misfortune to be dark in complexion and not to come up to their standard of beauty in physical conformation. If the characters of each race are permanent, and their respective boundaries fixed by an impassable barrier, the more elevated have a show of justice in claiming for themselves alone the designation of men, and in asserting their right to keep in subjection those degraded tribes which have no sufficient title to the name.

The question of the permanence or the variability of the races of men is therefore one of fundamental importance; since, if the former be established, not only is a strong argument afforded for original diversity of parentage, but (what is of far more importance in our apprehension) we are almost forbidden to hope that the races which we at present regard as inferior, can be in any way raised to our own level; whilst if the latter

New Quarterly Review, No. xv, p. 131.

can be proved to be the case to a sufficient extent, the greatest difficulty in the way of the idea of the community of origin of mankind is at once removed, and we are encouraged in the belief that there is no race, however degraded at present, that may not be ultimately raised to the highest elevation of which humanity is capable. In the discussion of this question, a vast number of different topics are involved. The number of cases in which positive historical testimony can be brought to bear upon the question of the identity of origin of two or more races at present exhibiting characters of a very diverse nature, are comparatively few; and appeal is necessary to Philology, a branch of science with which Physiology would seem to have no direct relation, in order to obtain the requisite information. The inquiry into the nature and affinities of the several languages at present or in past times spoken in different parts of the globe, has been carried on of late years with great earnestness, especially by the literati of Germany; and notwithstanding discordances on minor points, the leading philologists of the day are fully agreed upon certain general principles, which we think it well here to quote, for the sake of exhibiting to our readers the nature of one of the sources of information from which Dr. Prichard draws a large proportion of the materials of his argument.

"On examining the relations of language which are said to display marks of resemblance or conformity, two very different series of phenomena are discovered, which lead to very different results. Languages of neighbouring nations, or of nations long and intimately connected by local proximity, by traffic and commercial intercourse, or by political bonds, exhibit marks of such connexion in their vocabulary, or in the possession of a great many words in common. Of this description is the extensive resemblance in words between the French and English languages. In the languages of nations who may have come into a similar nearness of intercourse while in different degrees of social culture, when the one people possessed many arts and the knowledge of very many objects, of which the other were wholly destitute, it is evident that a much more extensive resemblance would take place than that which is discovered between the French and English. But this species of resemblance or partial identity in the vocabulary could never approach to what is termed a family relation of languages; that is, such a kind of connexion between them as affords proof of a common origin in the nations to which they belong, as in the instance of the English language compared with the German. The first and most important feature indicative of family relation between languages, is analogy in grammatical structure, and in the laws of combination, or, as we may so term it, the mechanism of speech.-Languages supposed to have been originally cognate have, in some instances, lost every other token of relationship except this. It generally happens, however, that grammatical affinity between languages is accompanied by a near resemblance in a certain part of the vocabulary. Occasionally this extends only to a comparatively small number of words; but they are words of a particular class, namely, such as serve to represent the ideas of a people in the most simple state of existence. Such are the terms expressive of family relations,—father, mother, brother, sister, daughter; names for the most striking objects of the visible universe; terms distinguishing different parts of the body, as head, feet, eyes, hands; nouns of number, up to 5, 10, or 20; verbs descriptive of the most common sensations and bodily acts, such as seeing, hearing, eating, drinking, sleeping. As no nation was ever found destitute of similar expressions, and as we know by the observation of facts even more than by the probability of the case, that tribes, however

⚫ I have selected this example as the most familiar instance. It is liable to the objection that the French and English do not belong to originally distinct families of languages. The Anglo-Saxon and the Norman French were, however, so different, that in a practical point of view this instance answers my purpose as well as any other.

rude, do not exchange their own stock of primitive words for those of a foreign idiom, it may be inferred that dialects which correspond in these parts of their vocabulary were originally one speech, or the language of one people." (Natural History of Man, p. 182.)

We have in the case of the languages of the several races of which the great mass of the population of Europe is composed, an example of both these kinds of conformity; namely, in grammatical construction, and in what have been termed primary words. And this conformity not only links them to each other, but connects them with the more ancient languages of central Asia, the Sanscrit or original language of the Hindoos, and the Zend or earliest idiom of the Medes, Persians, and Bactrians; and these two are so intimately related to each other as to leave no room for doubt as to their common origin. On the other hand, the languages of America are entirely different from those of the Old World in both particulars. Their grammatical structure is distinguished by a very striking feature; namely, the peculiar manner of forming compound words, which has been called "agglutination." This is very different from the ordinary composition of words in the languages with which we are most familiar; the process being to make up new compounds from a number of small fragments of simple words, and then to treat these compounds as if they were simple vocables, mutilating or contracting them to form other aggregate words. Thus when a Delaware woman is caressing or playing with a little dog or cat, or some other young animal, she will often say to it kuligatschis, meaning, "give me your pretty little paw." The word is thus compounded:-k is the inseparable pronoun of the second person, representing ki, and meaning either "thou" or "thy;"-uli is part of the word wulit, meaning "handsome" or "pretty;" gat is a part of the word wichgat, meaning "leg" or "paw";-and schis is a diminutive termination. This peculiarity, especially consisting in the introduction of very small portions of words into the compound term, and in the large capacity of the latter, distinguishes them from all known languages of the Old Continent, except perhaps the Euskarian; and even in this the agglutinating process is rarely carried to so great an extent as it habitually is in the American idioms. "The only Greek compound words," says Dr. Prichard, "which are comparable with those of the Lenape, are the long fantastical epithets used in burlesque by Aristophanes in some of his comedies. If we could imagine the main stock of words belonging to a language to be made up of such materials, and adapted not to poetry either serious or ludicrous, but to the purposes of ordinary conversation, we should perhaps have an idea of the nature of the words which furnish names for objects in the American idioms. The following is another striking feature in the physiognomy, so to speak, of the American language.

"These languages, like the idioms of perhaps all nations in a similar state of society, may be said to be rather more subjective than objective. The prevailing impulse in a rude people of hunters and warriors is, not to discriminate the qualities of external objects, but to give vent to the internal feelings, passions, and desires of their own minds; their egoism, or personal volition and action, is ever uppermost, and the predominant movement of their mental life. Circumstances and externals are secondary, and draw but little of their attention. Hence verbs or words expressive of emotion, will, and action, are the principal words in these languages, and are developed in the greatest variety of forms. There is a constant tendency to involve in the expression of the verb, and to denote in one