political constitution, like jural usage, like national art. Even where it fails to show strict ethnic descent, it shows race-history of another sort—the history of the influence which, by dint of superior character and culture, certain races have exercised over others. The spread of the Latin has swept away and obliterated some of the ancient landmarks of race, but it has done so by substituting another unity for that of descent; its present ubiquity illustrates the unparalleled importance of Rome in the history of humanity.
For these reasons, and such as these, the part which language has to perform in constructing the unwritten history of the human race must be the larger and more important. There are points which physical science alone can reach, or upon which her authority is superior: but in laying out and filling up the general scheme, and especially in converting what would else be a barren classification into something like a true history, the work must chiefly be done by linguistic science.
The considerations we have been reviewing will, it is hoped, guide us to a correct apprehension of the relations of these two branches of ethnological study. Discord between them, question as to respective rank, there is or should be none. Both are legitimate and necessary methods of approaching the solution of the same intricate and difficult question, the origin and history of man on the earth—a question of which we are only now beginning to understand the intricacy and difficulty, and which we are likely always to fall short of answering to our satisfaction. There was a time, not many years since, when the structure and history of the earth-crust were universally regarded as a simple matter, the direct result of a few fiats, succeeding one another within the space of six days and nights: now, even the school-boy knows that in the brief story of the Genesis are epitomized the changes and developments of countless ages, and that geology may spend centuries in tracing them out and describing them in detail, without arriving at the end of her task. In like manner has it been supposed that the first introduction of man into the midst of the prepared
