Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/534

516 humbug has vanished into the limbo of central Asia, whence he never came, according to our latest authorities. (If he existed at all, it was probably in Scandinavia.)

A race, indeed, may speak the language of another without having received any appreciable admixture of its blood; just as, for example, the pure-blooded negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States speak no tongue but English, Creole French, or Spanish. So, again, English has become the language of Ireland, without interfering to any large degree with the Celtic nationality of the people; indeed, writers who talk about the "Anglo-Saxon race" in America and the colonies forget that the Anglo-Saxon who emigrates is generally either an Irishman, a Welshman, or a Highland Scot, without prejudice to the chance of his being a Cornish miner or a Celtic Yorkshireman. Through these Anglicized Celts, the English language has taken possession of North America, South Africa, and Australasia; not only is it swallowing up the French of Canada or Louisiana, the Spanish of California or New Mexico, and the Dutch of the Cape, but in the New World it has blotted out the African and Indian tongues, and is assimilating in the second generation the German, Scandinavian, Russian, and Italian immigrants. Your true New-Englander is not a prolific father, like the German or the Irishman; and I believe myself that the proportion of Anglo-Saxondom in the America of our day has been grossly overrated. "Anglo-Celtic" is perhaps the truest description of the British nationality.

One of the greatest surprises of modern discovery in ethnical and linguistic science is similarly the overthrow of the Great Chinese Fallacy. Time was when the remote antiquity of China and Chinese civilization was an article of faith for European scholars. It was believed that the yellow man had developed his own culture, such as it is, independently for himself, in the far east of Asia. He was the pioneer in writing, printing, and the use of gunpowder. But now Chinese scholars have shown us, alas! that China really derived its civilization, like all the rest of us, by indirect steps, from Babylonia and Egypt. M. Terrien de Lacouperie first demonstrated the fact that long before the ancestors of the Celestial race reached the middle kingdom which they now inhabit, by the Hoang-Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang, they lived in close contact with that ancient civilized people, the Akkadians of Babylonia. From the wise men of Akkad they learned the rudiments of their arts; and when they set forth from Mesopotamia, a little horde of Bak tribes, on their long journey eastward, they carried with them both the early elements of Akkadian science, and the words and phrases of the Akkadian language. They reached China with letters, astronomy, and arts ready made, and