Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/322

306 be discriminated. In the first place there are those ethnic conditions existing now, or at any other point in time, whereby the individuals of mankind are grouped into categories of different comprehension, as clans or families, as tribes or groups of allied clans, and as nations, the inhabitants of restricted areas under one political organization. This side of our subject constitutes ethnology.

In the second place, the individuals of mankind may be regarded as the descendants of a limited number of original parents, and consequently each person has his place on the genealogical tree of humanity. As the successive branches became in their dispersion subjected to the influences of diverse environments, they have eventually differentiated in characteristics. To each of these subdivisions of the phylum thus differentiated the name race may appropriately be restricted, and the sum of the peculiarities of each race may be termed race-characters. This is the phylogenetic side of anthropology, and its nomenclature should be kept clearly separate from that of the ethnological side. The great and growing literature of anthropology consists largely of the records of attempts to discover and formulate these distinctive race-characters. Race and tribe may be terms of equal extension, but the standpoint from which these categories are viewed is essentially different in the two cases.

There is yet a third series of names in common use in descriptive anthropology. The languages in use among men are unfortunately numerous, and as the component individuals in each community usually speak a common language, the mistake is often made of confounding the tribal name with that of the tribal language. Sometimes these categories are coextensive; but it is not always so, for it is a matter of history that communities have been led to adopt new languages from considerations quite independent of phylogenetic or ethnic conditions. These linguistic terms should not be confounded with the names in either of the other series, for, as my learned predecessor once said in a presidential address, it is as absurd to speak of an Aryan skull as it would be to say that a family spoke a brachycephalic language.

In the one clan there may be, by intermarriage, the representatives of different races; in the one nation there may be dissimilar tribes, each derived by composite lines of ancestry from divergent phyla, yet all speaking the same language.

We have an excellent illustration of the confusion resulting from this disregard of precision in the case of the word Celtic, a term which has sometimes been employed as an ethnic, sometimes