rude Indian as he maintains against civilized science and experience the authority of his rude forefathers. We smile. at the Chinese appealing against modern innovation to the golden precepts of Confucius, who in his time looked back with the same prostrate reverence to sages still more ancient, counselling his disciples to follow the seasons of Hea, to ride in the carriage of Yin, to wear the ceremonial cap of Chow. The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all of scientific culture, is to honour the dead without grovelling before them, to profit by the past without sacrificing the present to it. Yet even the modern civilized world has but half learnt this lesson, and an unprejudiced survey may lead us to judge how many of our ideas and customs exist rather by being old than by being good. Now in dealing with hurtful superstitions, the proof that they are things which it is the tendency of savagery to produce, and of higher culture to destroy, is accepted as a fair controversial argument. The mere historical position of a belief or custom may raise a presumption as to its origin which becomes a presumption as to its authenticity. Dr. Middleton's celebrated Letter from Rome shows cases in point. He mentions the image of Diana at Ephesus which fell from the sky, thereby damaging the pretensions of the Calabrian image of St. Dominic, which, according to pious tradition, was likewise brought down from heaven. He notices that as the blood of St. Januarius now melts miraculously without heat, so ages ago the priests of Guatia tried to persuade Horace, on his road to Brundusium, that the frankincense in their temple had the habit of melting in like manner: . . dehinc Gnatia lymphis Iratis exstructa dedit risusque jocosque; Non ego." 1 Conyers Middleton, 'A Letter from Rome,' 1729; Hor. Sat. I. v. 98. Thus ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction, may at times find means to make stupid and evil superstitions bear witness against themselves. Moreover, in working to gain an insight into the general laws of intellectual movement, there is practical gain in being able to study them rather among antiquarian relics of no intense modern interest, than among those seething problems of the day on which action has to be taken amid ferment and sharp strife. Should some moralist or politician speak contemptuously of the vanity of studying matters without practical moment, it will generally be found that his own mode of treatment will consist in partizan diatribes on the questions of the day, a proceeding practical enough, especially in confirming those who agree with him already, but the extreme opposite to the scientific way of eliciting truth. The ethnographer's course, again, should be like that of the anatomist who carries on his studies if possible rather on dead than on living subjects; vivisection is nervous work, and the humane investigator hates inflicting needless pain. Thus when the student of culture occupies himself in viewing the bearings of exploded controversies, or in unravelling the history of long-superseded inventions, he is gladly seeking his evidence rather in such dead old history, than in the discussions where he and those he lives among are alive with intense party feeling, and where his judgment is biassed by the pressure of personal sympathy, and even it may be of personal gain or loss. So, from things which perhaps never were of high importance, things which have fallen out of popular significance, or even out of popular memory, he tries to elicit general laws of culture, often to be thus more easily and fully gained than in the arena of modern philosophy and politics. But the opinions drawn from old or worn-out culture are not to be left lying where they were shaped. It is no more reasonable to suppose the laws of mind differently constituted in Australia and in England, in the time of the cave-dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet-iron houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical combination were of one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and are of another now. The thing that has been will be; and we are to study savages and old nations to learn the laws that under new circumstances are working for good or ill in our own development. If it is needful to give an instance of the directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon our modern life, let it be taken in the facts just brought forward on the relation of ancient sorcery to the belief in witchcraft which was not long since one of the gravest facts of European history, and of savage spiritualism to beliefs which so deeply affect our civilization now. No one who can see in these cases, and in many others to be brought before him in these volumes, how direct and close the connexion may be between modern culture and the condition of the rudest savage, will be prone to accuse students who spend their labour on even the lowest and most trifling facts of ethnography, of wasting their hours in the satisfaction of a frivolous curiosity. CHAPTER V. EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. Element of directly expressive Sound in Language-Test by independent correspondence in distinct languages-Constituent processes of Language -Gesture-Expression of feature, etc.-Emotional Tone-Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and pitch, consonants— Emphasis and Accent-Phrase-melody, Recitative-Sound-Words-Interjections--Calls to Animals--Emotional Cries-Sense-Words formed from Interjections-Affirmative and Negative particles, etc. IN carrying on the inquiry into the development of culture, evidence of some weight is to be gained from an examination of Language. Comparing the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of civilization, it appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated man at this day substantially uses the method of the savage, only expanded and improved in the working out of details. It is true that the languages of the Tasmanian and the Chinese, of the Greenlander and the Greek, differ variously in structure; but this is a secondary difference, underlaid by a primary similarity in method, namely, the expression of ideas by articulate sounds habitually allotted to them. Now all languages are found on inspection to contain some articulate sounds of a directly natural and directly intelli· gible kind. These are sounds of interjectional or imitative character, which have their meaning not by inheritance from parents or adoption from foreigners, but by being taken up directly from the world of sound into the world of sense. Like pantomimic gestures, they are capable of conveying their meaning of themselves, without reference to the particular language they are used in connexion with. From the observation of these, there have arisen speculations as to the origin of language, treating such expressive sounds as the fundamental constituents of language in general, and considering those of them which are still plainly recognizable as having remained more or less in their original state, long courses of adaptation and variation having produced from such the great mass of words in all languages, in which no connexion between idea and sound can any longer be certainly made out. Thus grew up doctrines of a "natural" origin of language, which, dating from classic times, were developed in the eighteenth century into a system by that powerful thinker, the President Charles de Brosses, and in our own time are being expanded and solidified by a school of philologers, among whom Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood is the most prominent. These theories have no doubt been incautiously and fancifully worked. No wonder that students who found in nature real and direct sources of articulate speech, in interjectional sounds like ah! ugh! h'm! sh! and in imitative sounds like purr, whiz, tomtom, cuckoo, should have thought that the whole secret of language lay within their grasp, and that they had only to fit the keys thus found into one hole after another to open every lock. When a philosopher has a truth in his hands, he is apt to stretch it farther than it will bear. The magic umbrella must spread and spread till it becomes a tent wide enough to shelter the king's army. But it must be borne in mind that what criticism touches in these opinions is their exaggeration, not their reality. That interjections. and imitative words are really taken up to some extent, be it small or large, into the very body and structure of language, no one denies. Such a denial, if any one offered it, the advocates of the disputed theories might dispose of in the single phrase, that they would neither be pooh-poohed 1 C. de Brosses, 'Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues,' etc. (1st ed. 1765); Wedgwood, 'Origin of Language' (1866); Dic. of English Etymology' (1859, 2nd ed. 1872); Farrar, 'Chapters on Language' (1865). VOL. I. M |