The doctrine of descent and Darwinism . age. The latter case is by far the most probable,and is, in fact, received as the only one possible by mostof the linguists occupied with this question, and is mostespecially defended by Friedrich Miiller.*® **At thetime, he says, when there were races and no nations,man was a speechless animal, as yet, entirely destituteof the mental development which rests upon the agencyof language. Independently of the premisses unfoldedby natural history, this hypothesis is forced upon us bythe contemplation of the languages themselves. Thevarious families of langua
The doctrine of descent and Darwinism . age. The latter case is by far the most probable,and is, in fact, received as the only one possible by mostof the linguists occupied with this question, and is mostespecially defended by Friedrich Miiller.*® **At thetime, he says, when there were races and no nations,man was a speechless animal, as yet, entirely destituteof the mental development which rests upon the agencyof language. Independently of the premisses unfoldedby natural history, this hypothesis is forced upon us bythe contemplation of the languages themselves. Thevarious families of languages, which linguistic scienceis able to discriminate, not only presuppose, by theirdiversity of form and material, several independentorigins, but, within one and the same race, they point toseveral mutually independent points of origin. In order to afford the reader some notion of the con- RACES OF MAN. 307 nection of the families of nations, we give the subjoinedpedigree, in which Friedrich Miiller closely adheres toHaeckels It makes mention of species and races of mankind, the species being regarded as no longer existing, 308 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. while the present forms of man are distuiguished onlyas races. On this subject, we shall not lavish many-words, since, examined in the light, it is an affair of wordsonly. In the order of Primates, man constitutes a singlefamily, and represents it by a single genus. WhetherNegroes, Caucasians, Papuans, American-Indians, &c.,be called species or races, matters little. The facility ofintercrossing the different nations would favour theircharacterization as races ; but as the crossing of speciesdoes not differ in principle from the crossing of races,and as to the bodily varieties displayed in colour,hair, skull, limbs, and other characters are added theprofound differences of language, the division of thegenus homo into species, diverging into many races,seems after all more natural. But ultimately, as in thequestion of s
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