Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/398

 makes an astonishing difference in the circumstances and fates of those portions of mankind over which its influence is extended, and it would be the height of folly to transfer to barbarous races and uncivilized periods of human history analogies and conclusions drawn from the history of cultivated nations and tongues. The farther we go back into the night of the past, the greater is the probability that the limits of race and speech approximately coincide, and that mixture of either is accompanied by that of the other.

And if, in certain circumstances, a race may change its tongue, while yet retaining in its physical structure evidence of its descent, a race may also undergo a modification of physical type, and still offer in its speech plain indications of its real kindred. If the talk of our coloured citizens does not show that they were brought from Africa, neither do the shape and bearing of the Magyars show that they came from beyond the Ural, nor those of the Osmanli Turks that their cousins are the nomads of the inhospitable plateau of central Asia. This is the grand drawback to the cogency of physical evidence of race, and it fully counterbalances those which affect the cogency of linguistic evidence, rendering the aid of the linguist as necessary to the physical ethnologist as is the latter's to the linguistic ethnologist. Physical science is as yet far from having determined the kind, the rate, and the amount of modification which external conditions, as climate and mode of life, can introduce into a race-type; but that, within certain undefined limits, their influence is very powerful, is fully acknowledged. There is, to be sure, a party among zoölogists and ethnologists who insist much upon the dogma of "fixity of type," and assert that all human races are original; but the general tendency of scientific opinion is in the other direction, toward the fuller admission of variability of species. The first naturalists are still, and more than ever, willing to admit that all the differences now existing among human races may be the effects of variation from a single type, and that it is at least not necessary to resort to the hypothesis of different origins in order to explain them. In the fact that Egyptian monuments of more than three thousand years' antiquity show us