A point of difference between individuals, and to a certain extent between races, to which attention ought to be drawn, is stature. The statements which were so frequently made in old books, of races of dwarfs and giants, seem to be disproved by the extensive researches of modern travellers. It is even questionable whether the allusion so frequently made to giants in Scripture did not refer more to the monstrous moral character of those persons than to their physical stature. Be this as it may, there is no doubt that the human frame is subject to very great varieties in size, and that from causes which are not at present well understood. It does not appear that these departures from ordinary size occur more frequently in one race than in another. Of course we are better acquainted with the most remarkable specimens of dwarfs and giants that have occurred in Europe than we are with those of other races. The most remarkable dwarf that has been known in modern times is the small American, known as General Tom Thumb. This diminutive specimen of our race is only twenty-eight inches in height. One of the tallest individuals recently known was Charles Byrne, or O'Brien, an Irishman, who measured eight feet and a quarter high, and whose skeleton is now to be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

There are, however, races which are distinguished from others both by the smallness and largeness of their stature. It has been the exaggerated descriptions of these people which have given rise both to the mis-statements of sober history and the fables of tradition. The height of the European races, which is about the average of that of the whole family of man, is from four feet and a half to six feet. Various circumstances, however, tend to diminish the standard of height in a nation at different times. Thus it is stated that, during the wars of Napoleon, in France the national stature of that country was reduced two inches, from the loss of life amongst the soldiers, who were the tallest men in the nation. There is, however, no reason to believe that man's height is diminishing, either in particular races or amongst the whole of mankind. This notion, which early prevailed in the history of the world, and is supported with great earnestness by the Roman historian Pliny, seems to have gained ground from the supposition that the bones of various large extinct animals were those of men. Thus we find Buffon, the French naturalist, describing bones as those of human beings, which were subsequently demonstrated by Daubenton to be those of elephants, and other gigantic animals of that tribe. So far from any degeneration in size going on in our own race, we have direct proof that such is not the case, in the fact that the iron armour which is preserved to us, and which belonged to the warriors of former times, is seldom found too large for the men of the present day; whilst the prevalence of armour too small for the great bulk of our soldiers leads to the supposition that recently the Anglo-Saxon has gained upon the stature of his ancestors.

Of races in which the stature is below the average we may instance the Hottentots, amongst whom four feet is the average height of the female, and four and a half feet that of the male. The Bushmen are of even smaller stature. But this is not a general feature of the races of Africa; for we find the Kaffirs a strong and powerful race, with an average height as great as that of the European. We observe the same differences amongst the races of America. The Peruvians in the south, and the Esquimaux in the north, are of diminutive stature; whilst the Carribbees, the Cherokees, and more

especially the Patagonians, usually attain a greater than the average height. With regard to the Patagonians, they are undoubtedly a tall race of people, but their size has been much exaggerated. Byron gives an account of one whom he judged to be seven feet in height. Bougainville says, "Among those whom we saw, not one was below five feet ten inches and a quarter, nor above six feet two inches and a half in height." It is curious that the Patagonians should be accompanied by a race-the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego-which are almost as much below the average stature as the Patagonians are above. This is, however, precisely what we see occurring in the Kaffirs and Bushmen of the south of Africa.

There can be no doubt that physical power-that is, the strength possessed by the muscles-is a great element of national peculiarity. This subject has not been much studied; but there is a popular notion that physical power diminishes with civilization; and, at any rate, it might be supposed that the largest races would be the strongest. These suppositions, however, do not appear to be correct. The only direct experiments that we are aware of are those of Peron, who performed a series of experiments with a dynamometer* on men of different nations, with the following result :

There can be no doubt that the regular habits, and the constant supply of good nutritious food in civilized communities, tend greatly to maintain the strength of their inhabitants; whilst we must allow that there is an innate quality of muscle which cannot be judged by size, on which its power depends.

CHAPTER VI.

ON LANGUAGE AS A MEANS OF DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE RACES OF

MANKIND.

IT has only been within these last few years that the importance of employing the language spoken by man has been fully appreciated as a means of affording characters by which the classification of the races of men might be facilitated. It will be, however, speedily felt, when the nature of language is considered, that, if properly studied, it must be capable of throwing great light on the relation that exists between certain races and nations. The great cause that has retarded the application of the study of language in this direction has been the assumption of erroneous views with regard to the derivation and origin of languages. Thus, to take an example, writers

*From dvvaus, power. An instrument to measure strength.

on the English language have constantly assumed that our language has been derived from the Latin and Greek, on the one hand, and the Celtic or supposed ancient British on the other. It never occurred to the old etymologist to inquire whether Latin, Greek, Celtic, and English might not all have been derived from a common stock, which is really the case; not that we have not, and do not constantly import words from both Latin and Greek, as such words as communicate, investigate, and condemnation, from the former, and geology, anatomy, and ethnology from the latter, fully testify; but we find a vast number of words in Latin and Greek which correspond as much with words in the Sanscrit and Persian as they do with the English; and a complete investigation of the subject shows that the English, German, French, Celtic, Latin, Greek, Persian, and other languages are but branches of a common root, which has hitherto been traced to the Sanscrit.

Another obstruction to the investigation of language, and tracing its different varieties to a common stock, has been the assumption that what is recorded in the Bible of the confusion of tongues that took place at the building of Babel was the cause of all the varieties of language on the face of the earth. It will, however, be seen, by examining the tenth chapter of Genesis, that there was a great dispersion of the children of Noah before the attempt was made to build the city of Babel, and that whatever the confusion of tongues might be—and even the nature of this is doubted by theologians -it could only have been confined to that portion of the human race who were engaged in building the new city.

Although modern philologists have succeeded in tracing cognate languages to certain primitive stocks, they are not yet in a position to demonstrate that there was but one original language, or what was the probable nature of that language. We shall have subsequently to make some observations on the question, as to whether there is any evidence of more than one pair of human beings having been created. We shall then find that the demands of science, as well as all the data we possess, point to the origin of the whole human race from one pair. If this be the case, we must assume an original language, or at least such modes of expression as would originate in a common family. In the investigation of language, however, for ethnological purposes, we are not allowed to assume one language, and trace its roots through all known varieties; but we proceed from particular forms, and, comparing them with one another, ascend or pass back in time to those that were earlier, and have been parents of the first.

This process, although at first sight it might appear easy, is one that only can be pursued according to the special laws of change which it is known words in passing from one language to another have undergone. It appears that as long as a language is unwritten, it is subject to change; but these changes, although they go on more or less quickly, according to circumstances, are never sudden, violent, or arbitrary. As an instance of the kind of change that takes place, we may quote the fact that in the Teutonic languages the letter c of the Latin is almost invariably converted into h. Were it not for a knowledge of this fact, an inquirer would find it difficult to discover in the Latin word cor the analogue of our word heart; yet when we call to mind the regularity of the conversion, the little importance of the vowels in all spoken lauguages, we shall see that the r with its preceding letter constitutes the true root of the word. This brings us to another point in the study of words, and that is, that for the sake of denoting a relation

ship, letters and syllables are either placed after or before certain words, called prefixes and affixes, and, in order to discover the root of these words, it is necessary to separate such additions. In such Latin nominatives as cani-s and lupu-s, and accusatives, as cane-m and lupu-m, the last letters, s and m, are no essential parts of the word, but indicate the relations of the word to which they are attached to other words in a sentence. So with such words as am-a-bam, mon-e-bam, audi-e-bam, the syllables ba, or eba, are the sign of the past imperfect tense, whilst the letter m is the sign of the person or pronoun I. The root of the nouns, then, in these cases, must be sought in the words cani and lupu in the nouns, and ama, mon, and audi amongst the verbs. As illustrations amongst the adjectives we may take such words as gracilis, similis, docilis, utilis, in which ilis is evidently the sign of the adjective, and the root is to be found in the words grac-, sim-, doc-, and ut-.

We must not, however, give a lecture upon language; our object is to illustrate the mode in which inquiries into language have been pursued, and have thus assisted in the grouping of the varieties of men together upon the almost infallible ground that the same race will speak the same language, and that related races will have related languages.

In the ascertaining the relation of languages to each other there are three principal methods by which the relation between the different words that compose a sentence is indicated. Of these three different methods the Chinese, the English, and the Latin and Greek may be taken as examples. In referring to the roots of words in Latin, we spoke of the prefixes and affixes which altered their form, and this mode of expressing the relation of words in a language is characteristic of the Latin and Greek languages, and is called the classical method. The words added are called inflections, and such languages inflectional. In such a proposition as te-tig-i homin-em, the em in the last word indicates the relation between the object (the man touched), and the action expressed by the verb tetigi, i.e., of touching. In the verb the te denotes the time, the i the agent.

Now, although the English language has inflections, as is seen in such words as sister-s, touch-ed, lov-ed, yet, as a language, it may be regarded, in contrast with the classical languages, as non-inflectional. Thus, instead of saying tetigi, we say, I have touched, and instead of homin-i we say, to

a man.

The Chinese resembles the English language in this respect, that it has a separate word to express relations and objects, and is thus non-inflectional. The great difference, however, between the English and Chinese languages is this that the English has lost inflections which it once had, whilst the Chinese has never acquired inflections. This produces a great difference between the two languages, as, in passing through the condition of an inflectional language, the English has acquired certain abstract terms which are not found in the Chinese. Thus when we should say, "I go to London," the Chinese would say, "I go end London." They have no preposition indicating direction. Instead of saying, "The sun shines through the air," the Chinese say," The sun shines passage air," and so on.

In addition to these three kinds of language, we have another. Instead of the inflections being merely letters or syllables added to denote relationship, they are sometimes two words; so that inflection is developed as the result of juxtaposition or composition.

By these methods we can arrange all languages under the four following heads :

1. Aptotic (from a, not, and ptosis, a case). Languages without inflections, and monosyllabic, as the Chinese.

2. Agglutinate. Languages which are inflectional, but which have become so from the juxtaposition or composition of different words.

3. Amalgamate. Languages with inflections, which cannot be shown to have originated in separate and independent words.

4. Anaptotic (from ana, back, and ptosis, a case).

Languages which, like the English, once possessed inflections, but have fallen back from, or lost them.

In referring to language in our subsequent remarks, it will be of great advantage to make use of these terms as expressive of the form which any particular language assumes at the present day amongst the races of whom we have to speak.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN FAMILY.

BEFORE We speak of the races or families of men as they have been described and classified by ethnologists, we must say a few words on the subject of the heading of this chapter. To use the language of an eloquent writer, "Does the Bosjesman, who lives in holes and caves, and devours ants' eggs, locusts, and snakes, belong to the same species as the men who luxuriated in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—or walked the olive grove of Academe -or sat enthroned in the imperial homes of the Cæsars-or reposed in the marble palaces of the Adriatic-or held sumptuous festivals in the gay salons of Versailles? Can the grovelling Wawa, prostrate before his Fetish, claim a community of origin with those whose religious sentiments inspired them to pile the prodigious temples of Thebes and Memphis-to carve the friezes of the Parthenon--or to raise the heaven-pointed arches of Cologne ? That ignorant Ibo, muttering his all but inarticulate prayer-is he of the same ultimate ancestry as those who sang deathless strains in honour of Olympian Jove, or of Pallas Athenè-or of those who, in a purer worship, are chanting their glorious hymns or solemn litanies in the churches of Christendom? That Alfouro woman, with her flattened face, transverse nostrils, thick lips, wide mouth, projecting teeth, eyes half closed by the loose swollen upper eyelids, ears circular, pendulous, and flapping, the hue of her skin of a smoky black, and (by way of ornament!) the septum of her nose pierced with a round stick, some inches long-is she of the same original parentage as those whose transcendent and perilous beauty brought unnumbered woes on the people of ancient story, convulsed kingdoms, entranced poets, and made scholars and sages forget their wisdom? Did they all spring from one common mother? Were Helen of Greece, and Cleopatra of Egypt, and Joanna of Arragon, and Rosamond of England, and Mary of Scotland, and the Eloises, and Lauras, and Ianthes-were all these, and our poor Alfouro, daughters of her who was fairer than any of them-Eve? The Quaigua, or Saboo, whose language is described as consisting of certain