Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/81

Rh lation of the Introductory Chapter with some other extracts into my Note Book for private reference. Had I the work again before me, I might not perhaps think it requisite to enlarge upon the Notes I then made, and though I should certainly have preferred to look over it again before professing to detail to you its information, yet with this reservation I venture to think those Notes will be considered worthy of being introduced into our Journal. It appears to me one of the greatest advantages which this Society presents, that we have here the means afforded 'us of bringing together into a general centre of knowledge the hints and ideas as well as the actual information given by intelligent writers and observers of other countries as well as of our own, so as to be made easily accessible to all persons interested in similar pursuits. This seems also more especially required when those observations had been originally further diffused through various large volumes, and mixed up with other extraneous matters from which it might be a labor to extract them, besides the difficulty, to some enquirers still more formidable, of being written in a foreign language. It may be true that we may find many travellers, to use Mr. Earl's expression, "innocent of all ethnological theories", but few can be supposed to have been so little observant of facts as not to have recorded what they saw bearing upon Ethnological Science, and in the worst case it then becomes so much the more advisable to extract from them whatever little we may find worthy of being remembered. It may very probably occur also that some travellers may run into errors which may have the effect of retarding instead of advancing knowledge by the conflicting accounts they might render. But this is a mischance which may also befal even those who profess themselves to be masters of the Science, when they allow themselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of actual knowledge, as we find some constantly doing, and substituting imaginative expositions in the place of facts and authorities. The truths of Science like all other truths are clear and simple, they only require to be clearly stated, to be readily understood so as to command immediate assent. On the other hand errors are generally confused, and thus whenever we find a system overlaid with reservations and obscured with a multiplicity of indistinct conclusions which in reality lead to no determinate understanding, we may be sure that the perceptions are altogether faulty, and the guidance they offer not to be accepted.

I trust these preliminary remarks will not be considered misplaced in introducing, as they do, the opinions of an