Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/402

380, there are others in which linguistic evidence has a decidedly superior practical value and availability. The differences of language are upon a scale almost infinitely greater than those of physical structure. They are equal in their range and variety to those found in the whole animal kingdom, from the lowest organisms to the highest, instead of being confined within the limits of the possible variation of a single species. Hence they can be much more easily and accurately apprehended, judged, and described. Linguistic facts admit of being readily collected, laid down with authentic fidelity, and compared coolly, with little risk of error from subjective misapprehension. They are accessible to a much greater number of observers and investigators. Exceptional capacity, special opportunity, and a very long period of training, are needed to make a reliable and authoritative describer of race-characteristics. It is true that to distinguish from one another very diverse types, like the European and African, is a task which presents no difficulty. But, though we should all, in nine cases out of ten, recognize a native of Ireland at sight, who among us could trust himself to make a faithful and telling description of the ideal Irishman, such that, by its aid, a person not already by long experience made familiar with the type would recognize it when met with? The peculiarities of the native Irish dialect, however, are capable of being made unmistakably plain to even the dullest apprehension. A few pages or phrases, often even a few words, brought back by a traveller or sojourner in distant lands from some people with which he has made acquaintance, are likely to be worth vastly more for fixing their place in the human family than the most elaborate account he can give of their physical characteristics. Photography, with its utter truth to nature, can now be brought in as a most valuable aid to physical descriptions, yet cannot wholly remove the difficulty, giving such abundant illustration as shall enable us to analyze and separate that which is national and typical from that which is individual and accidental. This last, indeed, is one of the marked difficulties in physical investigations. Two persons may readily be culled from two diverse races who shall be